Ketchup Is a Vegetable: And Other Lies Moms Tell Themselves (23 page)

“Oh, you have a grownup coo-coo and Daddy has a grownup penis. Right, Momma?

“Yes, Baby…” I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall, mentally willing this conversation to end.

“Not like Tristan, he just has a LITTLE TINY kid-sized penis!”

“WHAT?” I screeched. I sat up so quickly that water splashed over the side of the tub.

Her eyes widened in shock as she realized she had just busted herself. I could see her gears turning as she quickly tried to manage damage control.

“Aubrey, how do you know what Tristan’s penis looks like? Did he show it to you?”

She bit her bottom lip and wrinkled her nose and forehead, “Welllllll, I
think
so.”

“What do you mean, you
think
so? Did you show him your coo-coo?”

She nervously pulled at her curls and twisted her hands together, “Ummmm… maybe just a little bit. I did… but Momma, Daddy has a big long grownup penis and Tristan just has a LITTLE kid-sized one like this…” She held up her left hand in front of her left eye in an okay sign and squinted through the eraser-sized hole in her fingers, “It’s just
this
big, Momma.”

I felt part of my large intestine herniate as I swallowed my laughter. I sternly discussed with her, again, how her body is hers, it is private, and we are not supposed to be showing it to folks — especially boys. I called Tristan’s mom, so she could talk to him and prayed fervently that our obsession with all things penile was over.

At bedtime about a week later, I was lying in Aubrey and Emma’s bedroom saying our prayers and making up silly stories, when Emma busted out with, “Momma, I hab one, two, free nuts!” She unfolded three fingers as she counted them out.

Aubrey began giggling uncontrollably.

Oh Sweet, Sweet Lord in Heaven. Not Emma, too.

“You have three WHAT?” I was nervous.
Really,
really
nervous.

“NUTS Momma, I SAID,” she leaned forward to scream in my face, “I HAB FREE NUTS!”

Aubrey couldn’t even open her eyes and was lying curled on her side, in the fetal position and holding her stomach she was laughing so hard.

Emma jumped off the bed and went running out of the room to tell her Daddy that she had “free nuts.”

I was so scared to ask the most obvious question, but I’m their Momma and it had to be done…“Aubrey, what is a nut?”

“Sumpin' a squirrel eats Momma!!!” She squealed and continued to laugh hysterically. “Emma is SOOOO silly!”

I took a deep cleansing breath before replying, “Yes. Yes, she is.”

B
eing a flower girl is a rite of passage in every little girl’s life. When Bebo, my younger brother, proposed to his girlfriend Anna, they asked all three of my daughters to be flower girls. They were over the moon with excitement; I, on the other hand, was a complete and total nervous wreck.

I mean, you’ve been reading about my kids. You
know
my kids. I had a lot of reasons to be nervous. There were eight flower girls in the wedding. Bebo and Anna had asked
all
of their nieces (who could walk) to participate and with that many children involved, someone was bound to screw something up. I had fifty bucks riding on one of my kids.

My brother and his wife were more than gracious and assured me repeatedly that if one or more of my children decided to bail at the last minute, it would be fine. Which was very kind of them — but I wasn’t worried about my children deciding
not
to walk down the aisle. I was terrified to think of what they were going to do
as
they walked down the aisle.

In the weeks before the wedding, we spent countless hours covering proper flower girl etiquette: keep your hands to yourself, walk slowly, don’t throw your flowers
or
your basket at anyone, and stand quietly beside Mommy. On our way to the rehearsal we reviewed flower girl protocol and Aubrey and Emma recited the rules by heart. They followed the rules, but I soon learned that there were a few areas of concern that I hadn’t accounted for.

The wedding was held at Children’s Harbor on Lake Martin in Alabama. The wedding party was standing at a point overlooking the lake and facing towards the cutest little chapel you’ve ever seen. As we began our first run-through of the service, I braced myself for unprecedented O’Bryant behavior. I knew it was going to be bad, I just didn't know how bad.

Aubrey walked down the aisle keeping her hands to herself and her head up, as she walked right past the wedding party and the minister, to the shore of the lake, where she began picking up boulders and throwing them into the lake. I don’t mean skipping small stones — she had to use both hands
and
lift with her legs to throw them in the lake with a loud, “KERPLUNK!”

Emma walked down the aisle, holding her crotch a la Michael Jackson (hee-
hee
), the entire way. She did not follow her sister to the water’s edge at first, but came and stood beside me just as she had been instructed — for about thirty seconds. At which point she lifted my knee length dress over her head and up to my bra. I grabbed my dress, shoved it down in a panic and looked up just in time to see the father of the bride doubled over with laughter and pointing me out to a few other family members.

As I was scolding Emma, I heard my sister exclaim, “Oh, Aubrey! NO!” I turned around just in time to see Aubrey picking a piece of neon green chewing gum up off a rock at the shoreline. It had
already been chewed
and was melted in the summer sun. She stretched it up towards her and the gum spun into a long stringy, sticky comet. I rushed to her side to help her, before it wrapped itself around her in the wind, and as I picked the threads of gum off of her hand, Aubrey decided to “help” me by biting and licking off stray spots of
someone else’s gum
.

The bridesmaids, bless their young and childless hearts, kept saying over and over, “They are so cute! Aw, how precious!” If seeing my children at the wedding rehearsal wasn’t good enough birth control for these girls, I’m pretty sure they are beyond all help.

We spent the evening vigorously cramming for the next day’s events.

“Emma, are you going to play in the lake tomorrow?” I asked in my best you’d-better-answer-me-right-now Mommy voice.

“No, Momma. I not.”

“Are you going to throw rocks in the lake?”

“Yip, I will Momma.”

“WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

She giggled and covered her hand with her mouth, “I jest kidding Momma! I not frow wocks. I not. I dwop my petals and stand wichu and dat’s all Momma.”

I turned to Aubrey and asked, “What are you going to do tomorrow?”

“I’ll walk down the aisle veeerrry slow-ly, and drop my petals veeeeerry gent-ley.”

“That’s right!”

We went through our game plan over, and over, and over again. It was bad enough that the Big Berthas were almost spilling out of my bridesmaid’s dress. You could basically see everything but my actual zipple and my Spanx were cutting off my circulation. It was going to be all I could do at the wedding to keep my bra
and
the Berthas inside my dress, suck it in and stand on a grassy incline in heels. The very last thing I needed at this wedding was to have to fish one of my kids out of the lake.

We had brunch in honor of Bebo and Anna the day of the wedding, and I dressed the girls in matching pink seersucker dresses. As we walked to the clubhouse on the resort where we were staying, I once again admonished the girls to be on their best behavior.

“What is brunch, Momma?” Aubrey asked.

“It’s a very fancy breakfast.”

“Ooooo, like Fancy Nancy?”

“JUST like that! We have to use our fanciest manners.”

They were
perfect
. Little angels in seersucker and hair bows. They put their linen napkins in their laps, said please and thank you and Aubrey even admonished my mother once, saying, “SHUGGIE! Don’t talk with food in your mouth.”

I was impressed… and scared chitless. Because I
knew
these were not my children and that at any minute we could begin a downward spiral that would end in certain death — or at least in me having to leave the wedding in the middle of the ceremony to take one or both of them back to our villa.

Inevitably one of the girls had to use the potty, so I rounded up my herd and headed to the ladies room. There were two stalls, so I sent Aubrey into one and Emma into the other and waited for them to finish. When Aubrey was finished, I went in to use the restroom myself, leaving the stall door cracked so I could keep an eye on them.

Aubrey was washing her hands when Emma came out of her stall. Emma could reach the soap but she was too short to get her hands underneath the water faucet.

“Aubrey,” I said. “Pick Emma up and help her wash her hands.”

Aubrey started to reach around Emma’s waist to give her a boost and Emma
freaked out
.

“NOOOOOOOOO! I DO IT BY MYSELF!” She screamed.

“Just put her down Aubrey, I’ll help her in a second,” I sighed.

Aubrey curled up into a ball at the base of the sink and looked up at Emma from her fetal position on the floor and said sweetly, “Here you go Emma. You can just step on my back. Go ahead, step on me.”

I watched in amazement as Emma giggled and stepped onto Aubrey’s seersuckered back to rinse her hands. I took this unprecedented display of sisterly love and teamwork as a good omen. Maybe,
maybe
, I wasn’t going to be completely humiliated at the wedding.

If I was nervous before the rehearsal, I was close to needing to breathe into a paper sack before the wedding. I continued to review The Flower Girl Rules with a few additions: no doing the pee-pee dance down the aisle, no playing with someone else’s chewing gum, no throwing boulders into the lake and please,
please
for the love of everything that is good and holy — no showing the wedding guests Mommy’s underwear.

I wondered if a member of the bride’s family might have slipped a sedative into the girls’ orange juice at brunch, because their performance at the wedding went off without a hitch. No rocks, no gum, and (there is a God in Heaven) no flashing my Britney at the wedding guests.

W
here exactly does a parent draw the line when teaching their children to tell The Truth? Is it enough to expect them to cough it up when they have bitten a sibling or taken something that doesn’t belong to them? How do we teach our children that while it’s important not to lie, sometimes The Truth isn’t always the nicest or best thing to say? Because my kids need to learn this lesson — the sooner, the better.

I’ve been asked by more than once by a child, “Did they get all the babies out of your tummy?” And that kind of thing is to be expected. I spent nine months telling you I was pregnant, I gained enough weight to look like I was having triplets and all I have to show for it is a six-pound fourteen-ounce baby, and a still-fat stomach. I can’t be offended by that kind of honesty.

The kind of honesty I’m referring to has more to do with The Truth that offends. Like the time Aubrey and I were at Wal-Mart and saw a woman with three inches of white roots, jet black hair that extended another two inches and every hair on her head sticking straight up. Aubrey yelled across the store, “WOOK Mommy! It’s Cwuella De’bille!”

Trust me when I say that
nothing
was lost in toddler translation and everyone within a twenty foot radius knew exactly who and what my child was talking about. And she did look like Cruella Deville — all she needed was a fur coat and a Virginia Slim in a red cigarette holder. And judging from the look she gave me and Aubrey, she was thinking about skinning us both.

There are some facts that simply do not need to be spoken aloud. As we all learned growing up, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.” While true — it’s a euphemism that is totally lost on toddlers.

Emma once climbed into bed with me while it was still dark outside and woke me from my slumber by pinching my nostrils closed and thereby cutting off my air supply. Not the most pleasant way to wake up, but I thought I was being a really good sport and going with the flow, when instead of flinging her into the floor as my endorphins kicked in and caused me to fight for survival, I made a “HOOOONK” noise worthy of a Jim Henson Muppet. She felt somewhat differently.