Dinosaur Mom Chronicles

70-something doctor on phone in next room with tech support, to the sound of a typewriter in the background.

“I try not to wear them because they are not comfortable,” says my mother-in-law of her very expensive new dentures, for which multiple adjustments have been offered (and declined).

Inspired reading choice: reading Andrei Codrescu’s retelling of “1001 Nights,” “Whatever Gets You Through The Night,” right after finishing “The Invention of Morel.” This freakish juxtaposition has been brought to you by the Howard County Public Library’s New Books shelves. Codrescu’s novel reads like “Once On A Time,” only if A. A. Milne were a dirty-minded 21st century literature professor. This is the first Codrescu novel I enjoyed reading. They fit together well.

My mistakes today have been many: staying abed even when I knew my swollen hands and feet* would not improve til I got up, eating an overly rich (but surprisingly delicious) meal at Chammps (or is that Champps?), and eating a plate of Russian sweets this afternoon instead of proceeding directly to a nap after my shower. Now I will go to sleep.

* Every week I manifest a new sign of kidney disease, the swollen extremities being the latest. But since the tests keep coming back negative, I am just going to stay fatigued and queasy and twingy until Monday. Then I think I may march into the Good Doctor’s office and stay there until he orders a bunch of new tests. Tuesday is when I see the rheumatologist.

My 12 year-old son, Tweenbot, has started proclaiming his desire for “high fashion!” clothing.

“When did you turn into a Bratz doll?” I asked him in Target as he was looking for The Exact Right Kind of white t-shirt.

He is definitely becoming teen-shaped. Watching the kids turn from kids into almost grown-ups is at least as amazing as watching them turn from babies into kids. It nearly matches the wonder I felt when Podrostok was born and they showed me the placenta. I was more bowled over by the fact that my body had grown a whole other organ to support the baby than I was by the existence of the actual baby. People in shock focus on odd things, I guess.

But I digress. Here is a list of fashion statements I like.

- Natural hair, sisterlocks, and dreadlocks on people with naturally kinky or nappy hair.

- Hijab, jeans, and university sweatshirt. Actually, hijabs with pretty much anything.

- Snoods.

- National and/or religious dress.

- Three-piece suits. I would say that only black men look cool in three-piece suits, but it may just be that the only white dudes I’ve seen in three-piece suits look they last bought clothing in 1974.

- Speaking of which, hats and wigs. C’mon, white people (specifically goyim), get with the program. Seriously, hats and wigs are awesome.

- Shaved heads on balding men. Thanks, guys. It is so, so much more attractive than the comb-over or the Dracula-style crests you might otherwise be sporting.

- Leopard-print pumps.

- Fake fur.

- Boiled wool.

- Silk anything.

- 1950′s foundation garments, but with lycra in them.

- Skirts that hit below the knee.

- Stockings that approximate natural skin tone of wearer.

- Summer-weight skirts and dresses lined with breathable fabric.

With that, I will return to my own fashion project – repairing the fake Coach tote a friend brought me from China. A strap broke. Hand-sewing with an upholstery needle hurts! The irony is not lost on me.

The police came to our house today.

They came to visit my mother-in-law.

Though Babushka has often threatened to call the authorities herself (usually to report me for crimes against humanity), this visit was instigated by our next-door neighbors. They appear to have lost patience with Babushka’s behavior toward their dogs. These are the dogs who used to bark for several hours at a stretch until shortly before Christmas, whereupon they stopped barking so completely that I feared they were being muzzled. Well, the dogs have to go outside sometime*, and they have a habit of leaping and yelping whenever they’re in the backyard and my belle-mere emerges into our backyard.

Despite the six-foot fence that separates our yards, Babushka feels sufficiently threatened by the dogs that (as I recently learned) she throws things at the fence and/or yells obscenities to scare the dogs away.

On Thursday, the neighbors filmed Babushka in action.

On Saturday, Babushka filmed the dogs and their masters in action.

This morning, Dino Spouse got a call from his mother asking for interpretation assistance in her unexpected conversation with the police.

*Said dogs are labradors, who are possibly the least scary dogs in existence. That being said, we have never seen the dogs being walked, just allowed into the backyard occasionally to relieve themselves (or, depending on your point of view, deliberately terrorize my mother-in-law). I’m pretty sure that’s not a good lifestyle for large dogs, and it probably doesn’t bring out their best qualities. Though for all I know, they may be stealthily loading the dogs up in their SUVs for treks to walk in babushka-free areas.

Mouse: Can I have a five-dollar bill so I can say happy birthday to Abraham Lincoln?

Tweenbot: Yeah, give me five bucks! (Thinks.) Let’s make it rain up in here!

I was disappointed to learn that the successor grocery to Safeway in the Long Reach Village Center was not going to be a local branch of Pikesville’s International Food Market (aka “the Russian Store”). But I checked out the Family Market just now and it will do just fine. In any event, it saves me the trip up to Lotte Plaza in Ellicott City or Super Grand in Laurel for cheap and ample produce. Plus it has a good selection of drinking vinegars. The service is super friendly, in any event. A Dinosaur Mom Seal of Approval may be in the offing.

Hocoblogs @@@

This *would* be the night that the Columbia Association chose to actually enforce its age rules for Friday night roller skating. To wit, it is a night that I am spending in the snack bar at the Supreme Sport skating rink. This is so my nine year-old captors can skate after an hour of having to ride around with me picking up Podrostok from his indoor soccer practice and dropping off Tweenbot at the mall*. I’ve been getting away with dropping off kids all this time but – nope, not the night that I’m supposed be delivering each of the kids to a separate destination at the same time. For the win, Tweenbot is having an IBS outbreak, plus his phone battery died as soon as I dropped him off. Add to this the fact that I seem to be suffering from Reynauds Syndrome lately, so the only way I can keep my fingers from turning blue and numb is to wear gloves and crank the heat in the car to, oh, 75 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m lucky neither Podrostok nor Mouse threw up in the car.

I think I’ll put my coat back on, speaking of temperatures. Damn it. Brr. Ow. Brr.

*Tweenbot is getting a break from being grounded tonight. He’s been under house arrest for three weeks because of his lousy behavior and academic performance at school. It seemed like a good idea to me at some point to remind him of the sweet taste of freedom, but now I can’t remember why.

We’re a household obsessed with zombies, thanks to Tweenbot and “The Walking Dead” on AMC. Over the last month we’ve read all the graphic novels in the Walking Dead series and watched every episode along with every zombie movie we could find on NetFlix*. I’m not a “destination television” person in general, but I am eagerly awaiting the new episodes.

Now that I have no reproductive innards to play with, the homunculi who once terrorized my gut as stray endometrial tissue (the “sea monkeys” of yore) have decided to colonize my urinary tract instead. I went to the ER Friday night with what I was sure were kidney stones. The CT scan said otherwise. So I have decided that these are zombie sea monkeys.

While we wait for TV zombies to return, Dino Spouse and I have taken to watching French movies on the above-mentioned Netflix. Mostly crime movies from the 70s and 80s. The plus of this, other than new sources of linguistic interference from my long-buried French, is that I get to ogle young Gerard Depardieu (and old Gerard Depardieu) and, for good measure, Jean Paul Belmondo. I swear, the first ten minutes of “Le Professionel” made me swoon.

*We signed up for Netflix when we got a PS 3. It has not lived up to all our dreams – for example, no “Shaun of the Dead” – but we have gotten fair entertainment value out of it.

Apropos de rien, we have the loudest dishwasher in the world.

At Howard Community College with the Dino brood this morning. Podrostok and Tweenbot are participating in a Junior Achievement program called Y-Fi. It’s a simulation exercise for teens where they pretend to manage a family budget.

“Why are we doing this?” they groaned.

“Because your father and I have the financial management skills of dope addicts and I want you to learn better habits than we have,” I explained again.

“Well, if we know you suck, why don’t we just do the opposite of what you do?” Tweenbot has never been the same since his discovery of logical argument at age 10 or so. “That way we don’t have to take a stupid class.”

“You know, you’ll start out that way. You’ll be like ‘now I’m going to do things my way’ and that’ll be cool for a while. Then you’ll hit your mid-twenties or so or get married or have kids and then you’ll start being like ‘OK, now I see what Mom was thinking,’ and then pretty soon you’re 40 and slavishly imitating your parents’ misery.” Silence.

Mouse joined us because Dino Spouse is working overtime in ur takses and my belle-mere is – well, at least she isn’t screaming obscenities. She has opened her door a couple of times and spoken civilly to various family members since taking to her chambers yesterday afternoon. My feeling of doom yesterday morning was somewhat warranted, it turned out.*

* Choose your own adventure! Read the snarky coda to this story or the serious coda to this story. Or, since I lack the technological wherewithal to code subposts or whatever from this phone, here are both.

Snarky coda: I offered her some fresh baked bread and expressed my regret that we hadn’t done anything for her birthday. She accepted and explained – quite calmly – that she hates her birthday because she’s 67 and living in a strange house where no one loves her and she works like a house slave. Then she went into her room and shut the door.

Serious coda: I really do feel bad about her birthday. Casino holiday notwithstanding, it still kind of makes me want to throw up that I forgot and didn’t get her any cards or warn the kids. Who wants to feel forgotten?

Operation Dino Freedom is not going to be easy. Dino Spouse says that his mom takes the idea of separate residences as the ultimate rejection, and he insists that we’re not financially equipped to fund two households. He is right. Yet I get a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I think about this for too long. I recognize this feeling as my flight instinct turning over, trying to start up the engine.