Currently viewing the tag: "getting to know the mrs."
I have two brothers and one sister. The order goes like: older brother (who just turned 30), me (28), younger sister (24), younger brother (almost 22).
When we were kids, our house was chaotic. Lots of people, lots of toys, lots of trouble.
It’s safe to say that my siblings and I divided our time equally between terrorizing each other and sitting in time out for our misdeeds.
There was no rhyme or reason for the way we picked on each other. But the absence of a motive never slowed us down. Growing up, we spent hours of our time chasing after each other, hitting each other, hiding each others’ toys.
Because we were older and responsible for “setting a good example”, my older brother and I were often in more trouble than my younger brother and sister.
The younger kids seemed to skate for offenses that would have landed my older brother and me alone in our rooms or worse. I’m still stinging from the time my younger brother bit me on the arm for taking the front seat in my mom’s car when he wanted to sit up front. He bit me so hard that he actually drew blood, and my mom’s only reprimand was to tell him to “buckle up.” The event reeked of injustice to me.
One day, tired of enduring punishments–but not at all sick of doling them out–my older brother and I decided to join forces. Usually, he and I were sworn enemies, but we had had enough of time outs. Enough of groundings. We decided that the only way to pick on our younger siblings and escape the consequences would be to work together.
I’m sure my parents would have been proud, had our motives not been so sinister.
Regardless, for a brief moment, my older brother and I became unlikely alliances in the greatest insult ever told.
(“Barbara” is not the insult. It’s my nickname for my little brother. I lovingly call him Barbara to his face, and he is fine with it.)
Our mission was clear: mischief without reprimand.
With our eyes on the prize, we went looking for Barbara and were pleased to find him minding his own business, playing with his cars. Unsupervised.
This was around the time that the “your epidermis is showing” joke was making the rounds at school. And if that gag had taught us anything, it was that the only way to tease without consequence would be to tell Barbara something about himself that was true but to make it sound repulsive and embarrassing.
And so it began…
Poor Barbara. We knew we had his attention by the distressed look on his face. He had no idea what a brain was, and now, it was the last thing he wanted to have.
And then came the all important denial.
It was beautiful. Our trick had been a success.
Then, it was time for the all-important, ever-present “run-and-tell-mom” move.
We had known it would come, but considering how clever the teasing had been, we expected we would at least be able to talk our way out of punishment.
“We were just trying to help him learn about brains,” we would say.
But then came a plot twist O. Henry himself couldn’t have written any better.
In a glorious twist of fate, my mother had affirmed our hour of teasing in the hopes of calming my younger brother.
Unknowingly, she had endorsed Barbara’s tormentors and rocked his 3-year-old world.
After realizing that she had not, in fact, righted Barbara’s concerns my mom spent a good 30 minutes explaining that everyone has a brain. Even his terrible older brother and sister.
We were never punished. I can’t be certain why, but I like to think my mother was too impressed with our cunning scheme. Maybe she just forgot to punish us, because she was in the middle of raising four kids under the age of 10.
Regardless, the alliance between my older brother and I quickly disbanded–probably over who ate the last cookie or something–and our house resumed its “every-man-for-himself” atmosphere.
But it didn’t matter. We had had our moment in the sun. It was brief, but “the brain tease”, as it has come to be known, is still the stuff of legends among my siblings. Even Barbara loves the story these days.
It will go down in family history as the day we committed the perfect crime.
When I got married, a friend of mine hosted a beautiful bridal shower in my honor. Knowing that I’m not much for shower games (I crack under the pressure of staged merriment), she kindly skipped the typical trivia and clothes pin fun in favor of a little “advice for the bride” session, where guests anonymously left notes of marriage advice in a basket for me to read aloud to the group.
The notes said sweet things like, “Always accept a kiss from your hubby, even if you’ve just applied your lipstick” and “Never go to bed angry.” How nice.
I read about 30 cards, all authored by women whose “mrs” tenures ranged from a few months to decades. And not one of those cards said: You are entering into an eternal game of ‘Mother, May I.’
So, you can imagine my surprise when that was exactly what happened.
For those of you who are not familiar with Mother, May I, it’s a game children play. One player is designated as the “mother” and all of the other players have to ask permission to move, in hopes of advancing toward a specific destination. In the version we play at my house, I am the “mother”, but I’m not really sure what we’re advancing toward. Perhaps insanity?
Please understand that this is not a passive-aggressive jab at the Mr. He is a wonderful man. He even endorsed today’s post (sort of*).
But seriously, does this ever happen at your house?
How about this?
Does this look familiar?
What about…
OK, maybe that last one was a bit of an exaggeration.
But, for reals, how does this happen? And, more importantly, how do I undo it?
I love the Mr, but I need to empower him to wash his hair with out me nodding in approval.
So I think the next time, he’s like “I’m going to get my oil changed this week”, I’m going to be all “No.”
See what I did there? By denying him permission, I might actually be able to bamboozle him into hiding the performance of these mandane chores from me. It’s a little feeble, but it’s all I’ve got. I’ll let you know how it works out.
*Here’s how I broke the news of this post to the Mr.
Me: Hey, would you be offended if I wrote about how sometimes marriage is like deranged version of Mother, May I?
Mr: What do you mean?
Me: You know how we’re always announcing what we’re doing to each other.
Mr: I don’t think you do that.
Me: [Awkward silence.]
Damn! His legal training has made him impervious to mind tricks!
I like choose-your-own-adventure books. I LOVE the Internet. I think medicine is pretty great–I especially like it when it’s healing me from illnesses. You would think that pushing all three of these things together might create some kind of magical machine of wonder.
I imagine this is what the creators of WebMD must have been thinking.
Given the ingredients, I can’t say I fault them for expecting their “Symptom Checker” to be a helpful tool. And perhaps, in the right hands, it is.
In my hands, however, WebMD’s Symptom Checker is like lighter fluid to an open flame.
I had always suspected WebMD was somehow conspiring to trick me out of my sanity, but the evidence become irrefutable a few years ago.
I can’t remember exactly what I was doing that fateful day in February, but knowing myself, it was probably something along the lines of: spending quality time with the television.
While the matter of whether or not I was giving my television a best friend hug may be up for debate, here’s what I’m certain is the stone-cold truth: The blissful quiet of my life was interrupted that afternoon by a muffled and repetitive sound.
Certain the noise was bass coming from a neighboring apartment, I was immediately incensed.
At this time, the Mr and I were living in an apartment complex that was overrun with graduate students. We had thought nothing of the grad student infestation when we signed the lease, because the Mr was a grad student himself. It quickly became clear, however, that not all grad students are like the Mr and, more importantly, that we were sharing walls with people who were slightly less well mannered than wild jackals.
Jackals that enjoyed playing loud, thumping music as the soundtrack to their evening gatherings. Rap and pop music with bass lines turned up so loud and thumping so relentlessly that they could find you anywhere in a two mile radius and accost your ears.
Sort of like Chinese water torture–but with more Ke$ha.
And at 3:30 A.M. that morning, approximately eight hours after the bumping started, I wanted those jackals dead. Strung up by their tails.
Hourly calls to my leasing office proved useless, and around 7:00 the next morning, when I had to crawl out of bed for work I was plotting to find these people, duct tape them to the top of a rocket ship and expel them from the earth. I wanted to unleash on them a fury of pain and nail scratching, unmatched by anything they had ever felt or imagined.
I hadn’t slept all night, and someone would have to PAY!
The pure volume and intensity of my hatred for these inconsiderate hyenas blinded me as I dragged myself through my morning routine, to my car, across town and finally, to my office.
But when I got to my desk at work…
The noise had followed me.
You know what’s not a great way to cultivate a dignified professional identity? Walking around the office asking co-workers if they can hear noises, too.
Me: Do you hear that? The bump, bump, bump.
Co-worker: *blinks*
Me: The noises? DO YOUR HEAR THE NOISES?!?! *panting*
Co-worker: No.
It was around this time that I started to worry that:
1. Something was wrong with me.
2. No one would be able to cure me, and this noise would last for the rest of my life.
3. My life span would be shortened by about 65 years and I would die that very week due to the persistent torture of this noise.
Of course, I held on to the outside hope that someone was doing this to me on purpose, like as a joke or as a way to cause me to grow so distressed that I ate my own hair.
Since there didn’t seem to be any silence in sight, I anxiously decided to turn to the Internet for a diagnosis.
Delirious from the haunting noise, I started entering my symptoms into WebMD. I wasn’t even sure where to draw the line between the symptoms of my affliction and the side effects of being tortured by a bumping noise for nearly 18 hours straight. Was I paranoid? Probably. Experiencing fatigue? Totally. Headache? Yes. Hangnail? Uh-huh. Dizziness? Sure.
I entered every symptom that looked familiar. And the results? They were terrifying. As I read through each of them, my panic grew.
WebMD suggested that I was suffering from one of the three disorders:
Tinnitus
A brain tumor.
Or schizophrenia.
See? This is the problem I’m talking about. Why do you have to be such a pessimist, WebMD? It’s hard enough just being sick. Why would you take a bad situation and make it exponentially worse?
Now, I’ll take some responsibility here to say that maybe I didn’t pick all of the correct symptoms. But how can a person think clearly about her symptoms when someone’s hosting an all-night and all-day rave in her head? WebMD, isn’t it a little odd to assume that I’ll be coming to you with a level head?
Was it WebMD’s fault that I was sick? No. But it was WebMD’s fault that I immediately ran screaming to my doctor, because as far as I could tell, I would NOT be able to cure a brain tumor with rest and chicken noodle soup.
I saw my primary care physician first.
He told me he wasn’t sure what was wrong with me, which was extremely comforting, and then, he referred me to an ear, nose and throat doctor (ENT).
The ENT couldn’t see me until the end of the week. So, the noise and my growing fear persisted for three days. While I still wasn’t ready to believe that I was schizophrenic, by the morning of my appointment, I was sure that WebMD was right about everything else; I had a brain tumor AND tinnitus.
And when THAT doctor didn’t know what was wrong with me, I was pretty sure my life was over.
The ENT suggested I see an audiologist. He thought maybe it was a hearing problem, but by that point, I was sure I had everything that WebMD had suggested I was also fairly certain I was going deaf.
The next week, when I went to see the audiologist, I had, more or less, abandoned all hope.
The audiologist tested my hearing but still couldn’t figure out what was the source of my troubles. They recommended I come back a week later for more tests.
By that time, I had gone about three weeks on minimal sleep because of the non-stop bumping, thumping bass sound.
I was thinking all kinds of irrational thoughts about every diagnosis WebMD had offered, and I was so cranky and stressed out that even the sound of my own breathing made me angry.
Basically, I was a delight to be around.
As a last resort, the Mr recommended I see an allergist, because his friends at school had been complaining about pollen.
I took my sad self and my last shred of hope across town for one more doctor’s appointment, and I did my best to put on a brave face.
I think it was around the part of our conversation where I mentioned to the doctor that I was questioning my sanity that he broke out every test he had. He must have felt sorry for me.
Needles, ultrasounds. The works.
Good news, guys: I’m not crazy! Also, it’s not a toomah!
It’s allergies. I’m allergic to pollen and mold. Hurray!
Some pills and nasal spray cured me within a few hours. I could have been bitter that I had been sent down such a crazy rabbit hole, but I was just happy to get a good night sleep. And I was so grateful to the kind doctor who had rescued me from the brink of insanity.
This is why I will probably name my first child after my allergist and NOT that menace WebMD, who didn’t even come close to a correct diagnosis and made the entire experience much more excruciating than necessary, and also why every year when February comes around, I like to think of it as “Congratulations, it’s not a toomah*” month.
*Because Arnold Schwarzanegger delivered the commencement address when the Mr finished law school, I have had the pleasure of hearing him say, “It’s not a toomah” in person(ish). If this is the kind of thing you’re into, here’s a link to the speech (the good stuff happens around the 7 minute marker.)
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