The Fish Pond

My Mother-in-Law: Putting the Fury in Infuriating

"So, Trout, did you tell your mother about your revelation? About the Easter Bunny, at my house?" asked my MIL, sitting at my kitchen table yesterday, in front of, oh, everyone in the house, and completely out of the blue. "Whisper it to her."

"Wha?" Trout and I both said, simultaneously.

"You know," she replied, "about why the Easter Bunny doesn't come to my house, and why the Tooth Fairy doesn't either."

Alarm bells were dinging in my brain like an insistent telephone that doesn't stop until answered. Trout knows the truth about the Tooth Fairy, but has never made the expected connection between the Tooth Fairy and Santa and the Easter Bunny. My head spun back and forth as my eyes shot daggers at my MIL and I looked quizzically at Trout to see what she'd say and do. Fortunately, she was distracted by the marshmallow peeps she was eating and arguing with her sister about something, so I carefully asked her to go in the other room to talk to my FIL, which she did while also indicating that in her lovely, blessed airheadedness she was confused by what the heck my MIL was talking about.

"Trout doesn't know about the Easter Bunny," I spat out.

"Yes, she does, FishyGirl," my MIL responded, "she told me. Honest."

Somehow I doubted that. "I am absolutely without a doubt certain that as of last night she believed in the Easter Bunny. What exactly did she tell you?"

"Honest, FishyGirl, I wouldn't lie about this."

"What. Exactly. Did. She. Tell. You?!"

"Well, we talked. The last time she was at my house, you know, about the Tooth Fairy and how she doesn't come to my house because I don't have any parents and it's her parents..."

"Did she ever mention the Easter Bunny specifically? Yes, she knows about the Tooth Fairy, but she hasn't made the leap to Santa and the Easter Bunny yet, and I fully intend to keep it that way as long as possible. Why on earth would you bring that up, anyway? Why would you do that, especially with all the little kids around? Why would you talk about that now?"

"Oh. I didn't know."

At that point I was so angry I was on the verge of saying something I shouldn't, so I excused myself upstairs for a while to calm down, brain furiously working on the damage control that I was sure I was going to have to do.

Later on, Trout was up in her room, playing her cd player too loud and dancing around, and I went in to talk to her.

"Trout, honey, is there anything you want to talk about? Anything you want to ask me?"

"No, Mommy."

"What about what Nana was talking about earlier? What did you and she talk about about the Easter Bunny?"

"Well, I know why the Easter Bunny doesn't go to her house."

Disappointment began to well up in my heart. This world doesn't have enough magic, and little girls need time to be little girls. This world has Bratz. This world has the Spears girls. This world has a war that has gone on too long. This world has far too much of life intruding on the innocence of kids. I want my daughter to have plenty of time to have magic, to have fairies and Easter Bunnies and Santa and wishes come true. To believe she can grow up to be a princess/brain surgeon/artist, if she wants to.

"Why is that, honey?"

"Well, it's not because she doesn't have any parents. It's because she's not Catholic!" she stated with confidence. I chuckled. Then we had a nice talk about how Christians are Christians and that the Easter Bunny visits those who aren't Catholic, too. Bless her little, sweet, innocent heart.

It was a whole lot easier to forgive my MIL once I knew that my little girl still has her magic.

You may wonder why the whole believing thing is so important to me, especially since we are religious and do celebrate the real reason for these holidays. I guess it's because my mother, for whatever reason, sat me down when I was 9 and told me the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny, and then gave me the birds and the bees sex talk. I was absolutely devastated about the first, and that made me more horrified about the second, I think, and I didn't pay that much attention frankly. I have no idea why she decided I needed to be told - I am perfectly happy to have my children believe as long as they like. I will certainly tell them the truth if they ask me about it directly, but I have no intention of stripping them of any fun and magic before it's necessary, and I do intend to ask that they preserve the magic for their siblings.

If you celebrate it, I hope you had a marvelous Easter, and if you're Catholic, I hope you survived the crowds at Mass with your faith and forgiving spirit intact.

Adventures in Misadventure

So last weekend, during the great Trout's birthday non-extravaganza (more on this later), my husband's cousin called to inform us that my FIL, in a feat of dazzling lack of judgment, had forgotten he is 63 years old and had been playing tag with my nieces on some rocks in the park in Hagerstown, had slipped, fallen, and broken his arm. Ultimately, it turned out to be not just the arm, but a couple of bones in his hand near his wrist and his right fibula, too, but it took a trip to the urgent care and then to the orthopedist two days later to get this information because my in-laws are rather short sighted and wouldn't go to the ER, where he needed to be.

This may not sound like much to you, but my FIL is my MIL's primary caregiver, because she has Parkinson's. She cannot drive at all, walks with difficulty and either 2 canes or a walker (she is stubborn and lives in denial, so she rebels against the walker and, heaven forbid, the wheelchair, even though it would make both her life and my FIL's so much easier and more pleasant), and needs help getting up if she falls. She is not a small person, so this is a feat unto itself. They insist on living 45 miles away from both BigDaddyFish and his sister, so nobody lives locally who can help them out at a moment's notice.

BDF spent probably half the day on the phone with one family member or another, trying to figure out what the hell had happened in the first place, then get my SIL calmed down because she was livid (after he fell, he DROVE HOME with my nieces in the car, with a broken arm and leg - the older one is 9 - to his house which is located on what is not-so-affectionately called "Dead Man's Curve" - they've had at least 4 accidents, two of them fatal, in the six years that they've lived there), then trying to figure out a plan of action so that they would be taken care of. To complicate matters, my FIL's 83 year old mother is staying with them right now, along with my husband's 19 year old cousin, who currently isn't able to drive due to some folly on his own part. And they live on a farm, complete with an 1800s era farm house on two levels that isn't disability-friendly. Woot!

I tried to ignore them as much as possible, and continued with making arrangements to go on a family trip to Shenandoah National Park this weekend, because I knew they had enough people in the mix and didn't need me getting involved, too. As soon as I booked our reservations, BDF informed me that we'd have my nieces this weekend, because my SIL and BIL are attending a conference in Florida and my in-laws were supposed to watch the girls but under the circumstances, obviously they can't.

So! Starting with trick-or-treating on Wednesday, my nieces, age 9 and 6, have been with us. We took them on our trip to the cabin we rented Thursday night, and on the hike yesterday, during which Trout had a severe (for her) asthma attack and we had the unfortunate timing to be going at the same time as some sort of school field trip of three buses full of middle schoolers who were clearly from a city environment rather than rural and didn't have a clue how to react to steep, rocky trails and kept pushing us off the trails as they passed us. Sunny tried to give up and sat down on the trail no fewer than 13 times, saying "I'm just so tired, I can't go any fwurther." We ended up not camping out last night because we are unprepared for that many people in cold temperatures (in the upper 20s/lower 30s in the mountains) and just came home early. We had to take two cars because our minivan only holds 7 and we needed to seat 8, and no rental place could come up with a suburban or large van on such short notice. BigDaddyFish hadn't really communicated all of his goals for this trip to me ahead of time and I was overwhelmed with having so many people around and so many things to do this week and I didn't have enough time to prepare properly, so we had the resultant/requisite 4 hour fight before we left, so we left super late. I got 2! - count 'em, one, two - hours of sleep Thursday night, and driving home last night was probably as impaired as if I had been drinking for hours. Nemo woke up and screamed for the last 45 minutes of the drive home. Every. Stinkin'. Minute. And there was an accident on our route, so while we should have been fine getting hitting DC traffic just after 7, we were stuck in bumper to bumpter traffic from 66 near Tysons? (I think that's where I was) all the way there along the inner loop and onto 270.

Trout lost one of those loose teeth on Thursday, while I was driving home from a conference with Sunny's teacher.

Nemo started to walk this week. He needs shoes that will protect his feet.

My nieces are lovely and well behaved but my children become even more unruly when they are here (to show off? to emphasize that we are their parents and not my nieces' ? to demonstrate their annoyance at being imposed upon? WHY?) and they have been HORRID. Trout's tween angst didn't waste any time in rearing its ugly head.

BigDaddyFish has developed a head cold, thus making him whiny and more grumpy than usual, and also making him absent, so all the child care has fallen on me and any reinforcements I choose to employ. He is supposed to start his new job on Monday, and we'd been trying to have some family time before he starts. He has another stressful situation that developed during his 2 weeks off that I can't blog about, and it has been eating up his time and attention.

There were some good moments, and I'll blog those later after the girls leave, but I can honestly and truly say that our family size is perfect just the way it is.

Not on a Plane

So the phone rings Wednesday night at quarter til 11.  Both BigDaddyFish and I still have a grandparent, both in their 80s, plus our parents aren't exactly in the best of health.  Add to that I still hadn't heard an update about my cousin's baby, and I automatically assume the worst, as no one calls us that late unless it is an emergency.  BigDaddyFish was already asleep, and I was sitting up in bed reading and well...I was dozing, I think.  I answer the phone, it is my mother in law.

"Oh, sorry, did I wake you?"  Um, what did you think would happen calling that late?  "Can I talk to BDF?"  I tell her he's sleeping and won't wake up (I think I've mentioned that particular affliction of my husband's family), and ask what's up.

"Oh, FIL went down to the kitchen and turned on the light, and there was a snake in the middle of the kitchen floor."  My first thought is, frankly, what the hell do you want us to do about it, since we live an hour away and it is 11 o'clock, but I didn't say that out loud.

"He wasn't bitten or anything.  He caught it and put it in a milk jug.  I think it's a pit viper or something - it tried to strike him when he was catching it.  I'm just trying to figure out how it got in the kitchen."

Motherfucking snakes in the motherfucking kitchen.

Now, I have to tell you that they live on 28 acres in rural Maryland, on the banks of the Antietam Creek.  Most of that land is not "developed";  they used to have sheep grazing, and some hay growing that a sharecropper planted, and some of the land has an unsuccessful vineyard planted.  FIL didn't have the time or a realistic expectation of the work it would take when he bought the place 5 years ago, so everything kinda went to pot.  Then my MIL got Parkinson's, and since then he is her primary caregiver, so he really doesn't have time to work it now.  The sheep have been sold (I kinda miss them), no one is working the rest of the land, unless you count the millions of hours FIL spends cutting the damn grass (we can't convince him it's a farm, let the stuff grow), and they are planning on trying to sell the house soon, as my MIL can't get up and down the steps too well, and it's really just too much house for them.  The house itself was built in about 1910, and has a number of obvious additions as things like indoor plumbing and electricity came into vogue.  Including two porches that you can crawl under if you're brave enough.

I tell her the snake probably just crawled in through the porch.  She asked if we had a book to identify snakes, and I told her we did, and they could borrow it later.  After verifying that everyone was, in fact, fine, I told her I would tell BDF about it in the morning, and I went to bed.  In the morning I told BDF all about it, asked him to kindly remind them NOT to call that damn late unless it is IN FACT an actual emergency, and figured it was the end of it.

I am an idiot. 

Friday my aunt called and asked me to visit my cousin since she was having some problems breastfeeding, and since I couldn't locate my local babysitters I asked the in-laws to come and watch the kidlets, which they did.  BDF came home while I was still at the hospital, and they left before I got home.  I noticed that the snake book was out in our living room when I got home, so I assumed that they identified the snake they had seen and set free.  Isn't that what you'd think?

Today they called and asked if they could come by because they forgot to take the snake book back to their house (Yo, Fishy, clue).  I said sure, we were just watching the football game.  So they came down this afternoon.  With a bowl of watermelon for Sunny.

And the fucking snake, in the milk jug.

I should mention I don't DO snakes.  I hate them.  I am fine with them as long as they stay away from me and mine; I will happily stay away from them.  (Yes, I know, I live in the damn forest.  I've still managed to avoid the damn things - that's partly why we pay the kid down the street a pittance to cut the grass for us)

I made him leave the snake on the porch.  Only my MIL thought it reasonable that I wouldn't want a potentially poisonous snake in the house in a milk jug with a screw on cap with three kids under the age of 7, including a very, very curious 2 year old who has no fear of anything.  Not to mention the pregnant woman and the middle aged woman with Parkinson's who walks very slowly with two canes.  BDF and FIL wanted to bring it in the house.  To warm up.  The cold blooded creature.  Am I the only one who can see this is just gonna piss the thing off?  I might have muttered something about it not needing to be inside, and belonging in its natural habitat, or maybe I just cursed a lot under my breath.

They went outside during commercials, and compared the book with the snake.  They seemed to have some problems deciding, but the main concensus was....

Eastern Copperhead.

I made them put it back in FIL's car.  In the milk jug. 

BDF asked if they wanted an empty fish tank to take back to the house to keep it, and FIL mentioned that he will be setting it free in its natural habitat.  He'd better.

I am not going to the farm until December.  Maybe not even then.  Maybe not until....February.