You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (19 page)

The scouts are selling popcorn and candy in tins roughly the size of a doghouse. Who needs that?

A flyer left in my door earlier in the day advised, “It’s time to order your holiday popcorn!” I don’t get the connection. The wise men brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh, not butter toffee, confetti, and “bedda cheddar.”

Whatever. I can easily say no to strangers, even ones in uniform. And I can even say no to my mom friends who have torpedoed more than a few girls’ nights out by covering the table—and displacing my yummy pear martini in the process—with an array of overpriced gift-wrap samples for their kids’ school fund-raiser.

But saying no to the Princess is, naturally, much harder.

There are four catalogs to choose from, she chirps while fanning them out on the coffee table one night.

“Isn’t-it-time-you-said-yes!-to-aromatic-oils” she begins in a stilted monotone, and I hold up my hand to stop her before she can add, “sir or madam.”

“Don’t need any.”

But she has been trained, Navy SEAL–style, apparently, and failure is not an option.

“Dreidel salt and pepper shakers?”

“We’re not Jewish.”

“Caramel mittens and chocolate kittens gift set?”

“Gross.”

“Lavender body mist?”

“Do I look ninety-five???”

“If I sell $500 worth of merchandise, I get a cool hamburger phone just like the one in
Juno.
”

Great. My daughter’s role model is a pregnant teenager who talks into a sesame-seed bun.

It almost made me nostalgic for when she launched a campaign for an iPhone. For me. Because she was mortified by the age of my uncool cell phone.

She would look at me with a mix of pity and frustration when I said that I was holding out for a cell phone that would wash the cat, cook a pizza in its tiny little guts, and even go to her dance recital so I wouldn’t have to.

“Kidding!” I had said when her sweet little face fell, dumping the freckles right off it and onto the floor. “You know mommie knows it’s unsafe to wash a cat.”

“You’re a dinosaur!” the Princess said. Her words were harsh but her expression was worse. I imagined it was the exact expression worn by Orville and Wilbur Wright when they were greeted by crowds wearing
STEAM LOCOMOTIVES ROCK!
T-shirts wherever they went.

“Yes, but a dinosaur who loves you enough to . . .” And with that, I won over the Princess and made her forget all about the hamburger phone and lavender body mist and all the rest of it.

I was going to take her to American Girl Place in New York City.

Which was way better than the hamburger phone, judging from her reaction.

Fast-forward one month and we’re sitting in the American Girl Place Cafe, which is pink and gorgeous and offered a couple of surprises to this dinosaur.

For starters, the waiters are surprisingly hot. I halfway expected ours to place my Cobb salad in front of me and then, with a flourish, free himself of his breakaway shirt and pants, Chippendales style.

Second, you need to know about the chocolate mousse. It’s served in a little green plastic flowerpot with a daisy stuck in the center and it’s unbelievably delish. (Later that week, I even told the waiter at Bobby Flay’s fancy restaurant that he should try to get their recipe and he looked faint.)

American Girl Place, all four levels of it, is a wonder. All day long, cabs disgorge mothers, doll-clutching daughters, and a few visibly horrified, red-faced little brothers at its doors. Not only is there a doll hair salon but also a doll hospital where destructive little girls from all over the East Coast take their Felicitys and Nellies to repair detached limbs or missing eyes. (The average “hospital” stay is two weeks, so at least they must have a great HMO.)

When the Princess and I realized she wouldn’t be able to dine with her doll because the doll wouldn’t be done with her hair appointment by then (seriously), a concerned, hot
waiter escorted us to a veritable orphanage of loaner dolls. I had a brief
Bride of Chucky
moment (well, there were so
many
of them) before he positioned the freckled blonde we selected between us in a pink chair that clipped to the tabletop and fetched her a cup of tea. I felt a brief, nasty tug to say, “Dude, you do know this doll isn’t real, right?”

We fussed over the doll until the mousse came.

“You’re on your own, Toots,” I mumbled between spoonfuls. The orphan seemed to frown.

On every table was a fancy little box of “icebreaker” questions. Ridiculous, this notion that I would need a cheat sheet to talk to my own daughter. But, uh, let’s just say that now I know if Sophie could be any tree in the forest, I know which one she would be.

After lunch, we attended the American Girl musical revue,
Circle of Friends
, which was about, uh, a circle of friends, and contained many Wholesome Life Lessons that made me miss the waiters. Sorry. I like a little off-color cynicism after a big meal.

Sure American Girl Place was gimmicky and there were some dads there who looked about as happy as Lindsay Lohan at a Franklin Graham crusade, but generally it was a delight. Would we go back? Probably not, because now that the Princess is in middle school, she’s aging out of doll land and into the world of middle-school monthly “dances,” and talk of who’s going with who, which, from what I can tell, is more a state of mind than actual fact.

Still, I’m glad we had the experience. Being a mom brings these profound moments when your heart is so full, and they come out of nowhere.

A walk down the baby products aisle at the drugstore will make your gut ache when you catch the scent of Johnson’s baby powder. Whoa. Where did that come from?

I remember getting emotional when we went to a Hilary Duff concert, and it was the same way at American Girl Place. We’d always remember our day there but we wouldn’t go back.

The mom-daughter moments won’t always be nearly as sweet as talcum powder or swaying together with a glow stick in a concert hall or excitedly saving the plastic flower stuck in the mousse for a souvenir, but when it is, it’s spectacular, y’all.

But even though I can be a bit of a mushpot over things involving the Princess, the moms who completely put their lives on hold for their kids mystify me.

The latest pain-in-the-ass trend is for moms to create little bento-box lunches for their children.

Now everybody knows Japanese mothers are crazy-san because they’ve been doing this stuff for years, getting up in the wee hours to carve a bird-of-paradise from a single carrot or whittle a cluster of radishes into the shape of a dragon.

American mommies consider it good enough to toss a couple of Uncrustables into a bag and pray that they thaw in time to be edible.

But now, the bento-box obsession is showing up in my kid’s school. One mom I heard about cut up a boiled egg to
look just like a daffodil; another carved a realistic bunny rabbit entirely out of white cheddar for her kid’s bento box; another made faux sushi rolled from strawberry cream cheese, bananas, and white bread.

In Japan, the bento lunch box is highly competitive because mothers believe a successful bento box represents the “uprightness of the household and the true measure of a mother’s love.”

Baloney. And I mean just in the round sense, not whittled into the shape of the Jonas Brothers.

Great. I finally got the hang of making pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head and now I gotta mold rice balls that look just like Hello Kitty for my kid’s lunch box. Wonder if it’s OK to substitute Sour Patch Kids candy for miniature fruit kebobs shaped like bees and dragonflies favored by some supermoms.

“Missy’s mommie made macaroni-and-cheese shaped just like a VW beetle and she used lemon Fruit Roll-Ups for the windows,” the Princess sulked one day as I tossed a bag of cheese-type-product-flavored Doritos into her plain insulated lunch bag from Target.

“Missy’s mommie sounds like she needs several months of intense psychotherapy,” I said cheerfully. “Uh. Don’t mention to anyone that I said that.”

In Japan, the bento-box craze is as competitive as cheerleading in Texas. Like I was saying, the idea is rooted in a centuries-old belief that a properly made bento box sent to school reminds the child that he is cherished and his home is
a safe haven. Even as he is biting into a train caboose made entirely of whittled sea urchin, his mother is literally counting the minutes until his return home. Nah, that won’t give him a complex.

Far be it from me to criticize another culture’s ancient beliefs. Kidding! Of course that’s what I’m doing but it’s for all the right reasons: American mommies have enough crap to do without fretting about our kid having Most Honorable Lunch Box. We have gift wrap to buy; pilgrimages to fancy, overpriced doll stores to make. When will it ever be enough?

On the other hand, I’m not terribly worried that this bento-box craze will take hold in the South for very long. It’s damned near impossible to make a decent Dora the Explorer out of potted meat.

Here’s a great reason to avoid buying your kid a bento box. The little compartments are too small to properly contain these amazing cookies, made by my mother-in-law, Nancy, for her grandchildren since they were old enough to chew. They’re ridiculously crisp and buttery and take a bit of time to master but you’re smart (else you wouldn’t have bought this book or associated yourself with someone who did) and I have great faith you can do it. When you do master them, be sure to mail me some so I can let you know how they stack up. I know some of you are getting all nervous because of the two sticks of butter but, hell, that’s just the morning toast allotment for Paula Deen, and everybody loves her cooking. Besides, the oatmeal balances everything out, am I right?

• 2 sticks butter
  
• 1 cup
  each
  white and brown sugar
  
• 2 eggs, beaten
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  
• 1½ cups flour
  
• 1 teaspoon
  each
  baking soda and salt
  
• 1 cup finely chopped nuts (any type of nut will do)
  
• 3 cups oatmeal
  

Cream butter and sugars; add eggs and vanilla. Set aside. Sift together flour, baking soda, and salt and add to egg mixture. Fold in nuts and oatmeal and mix ’til everything’s smooth. Form into a roll the size of those store-bought refrigerated cookies. Wrap the roll in wax paper and refrigerate until the dough is firm enough to slice. Using sharp knife, slice 1/4-inch wide (more or less) cookies and place on cookie sheet. Bake at 325 degrees until lightly brown (about 12 minutes). Remove from pan and cool on wire rack.

They’ll stay fresh in an airtight container for a week or so, although we’ve never tested that theory. Nancy usually gives us a big Ziploc bag of ’em to take home from our Christmas visit to her house four hours away and they don’t even last half the drive.

We didn’t decorate for Halloween this year, at least not in the traditional way, with cardboard skeletons and red-eyed bats taped to the front door. No, when the kids trick-or-treated at our house, all they saw was the crumpled and tear-stained third-quarter statement for our 401-Kaput tacked up there.

And while most kids were oblivious enough to say, “Huh?”, their helicopter parents got the message and shuddered visibly in the shadows.

When I opened the last statement, I jumped out of the window. True, it was the kitchen window and I only fell two feet, so the whole scene lacked drama, but I thought that was the required reaction to extreme financial turmoil in America. And I am nothing if not patriotic.

The economy being in the tank is affecting all of us. At
our monthly girls’ night out, we split overpriced entrees and asked for, count ’em, three free breadbaskets. One of my more well-heeled friends was particularly despondent as she looked sorrowfully into her empty glass of “house” Chardonnay.

“I got my hair cut at Supercuts today,” Claire whispered.

“Was he at least gay?” asked another former rich girl.

Claire sobbed. “He wasn’t even a he. He was a she. And all she wanted to do was talk about how her kid made a picture of a turkey for Thanksgiving by outlining his palm for the turkey’s body and his fingers for the turkey’s feathers and it won a
prize.
When Rafiki did my hair, it was like a floor show, all those spats with that diva Fernando, who was always leaving to go get another bro-zilian wax. The sexual tension was overwhelming. And she thinks her kid’s the first one to trace a turkey out of his hand. What an idiot!”

Since I’m the only one in the group whose kid goes to public school
and
who doesn’t belong to a country club, I was feeling a little flush by comparison.

That’s the beauty of being a redneck at heart. We tend to live
below
our means because we’re always terrified that somebody’s going to take away what we have.

This year, the economy was way scarier than any Jaycees haunted house or neighborhood party with obligatory bowls of grape “eyeballs” and spaghetti “intestines.” That’s child’s play. The truth was that these quarterly statements couldn’t be any more frightening if T. Rowe Price himself delivered
them inside Alan Greenspan’s severed head. Which a few bitter folks wouldn’t mind so much.

The only good news is that trend watchers say that being frugal is actually hip these days. If you drink Starbucks instead of McDonald’s coffee, you might find yourself getting the same sneer that, just a year ago, was reserved for people who drove Hummers.

Funny how much difference a year makes. The same folks who kvetched about the lousy job their undocumented housekeeper did on dusting the ceiling fan blades now squeal excitedly, “Ooooh! I think I have a coupon for a free appetizer!” when they go out to eat, and then proceed to dump the contents of their Dooney & Bourkes onto the table at Ruby Tuesday.

And just recently I overheard a venerable old country-club snoot huff at the grocery store clerk: “Excuse me, my dear, but I am quite certain that Tide detergent is a bogo.”

Financial experts say we shouldn’t panic-sell stock because this, too, shall pass. They explain all this in terms of “bulls” and “bears,” with bull markets being good and bear markets being trying to figure out how to comfortably sit on the bus while wearing a barrel and suspenders. Call it the recessionista look.