I’m not very good at relaxing. Those who know me best are sitting at their computers, nodding vehemently while (perhaps) shouting, “No shit, dumbass.” Even if I win at life*, I suck at relaxing.

When my life gets stressful, like it has been for the past few months, instead of doing the smart thing and taking a nice bath** or zoning out and watching some reruns of The Girls Next Door, I work. More. I take on more projects. I buy diseased plants from the nursery just to prove to myself that I can rehabilitate them. I add more pressure. When I feel that pressure? I add even more.

I actually DO own this orchid – and dozens more like it. They’re blooming right now. It’s gorgeous.

It’s a vicious cycle. It’s also how I get so much done.

Until I hit That Point. The point at which I realize I have so much on my plate that it’s going to smother me while I sleep like that pink goo from Ghostbusters II if I don’t watch out.

(I don’t imagine my pressure goo actually dances to that (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher song – I imagine my goo is into either thrash metal or Burt Bacharach or both)

It’s now the time of year in Chicago in which dead people vote, roads begin to get worked on, and everyone slithers out from their houses, all pasty, sluglike and squinting into the sun. We’ve not been outside unless it’s on the way to or from the car for the better part of four months, even after a winter as mild as the one we just had. We’re all a deathly shade of what I like to call, “Midwestern Pallor,” and we’ve, of course, forgotten how to be neighborly. After all, we’ve been hiding in our houses for months now – we’re just as likely to try to gnaw on our neighbors as we are to invite them for a BBQ. Our social skills have gone down the shitter.

But this weekend was one of the first genuinely nice weekends we’ve had in months that I didn’t feel like I was going to die from the flu or whatever. It was 80 degrees and sunny, though the chance for thunderstorms loomed large, they didn’t happen until nightfall.

I strapped on my ugly gauchos and an ill-fitting tank-top, noting my particular pallor was even more pronounced than normal, as I prepared to Tackle The Garden. If you’re read my blog before you will know two, maybe three things:

1) I love to garden. I also love hotdogs, the color blue, and Tom Jones.

B) The people who first owned the house went all bush-wild and added a fuckton of professionally landscaped – yet hideously fug 70’s style bushes. No, not vaginas. Although everything WAS a bush back then. The people who I bought the house from had let it all go to shit, so I’ve spent the better part of two kids and four years trying to hack the garden into submission.

3) I consider proper punctuation bullshit.

For the better part of two days, The Guy on my Couch and I tackled the garden. Mulching, seeding the lawn, bagging up refuse, watering, pulling weeds, training roses (sadly, not to shake or speak).

It was the best, most stress-relieving thing I’ve done in months. I’m reminded again of how much I need balance in my life. How much I need to stop, smell (or spray) the roses. How much better I feel after a good solid day’s worth of solid hard labor. How I need to remember that not everything is such! serious! business!

How I need to stop pushing and learn to breathe.

Just breathe.

*I don’t.

**No, I’m not 800 years old, I just know the value of a good bath. Oh shut your whore mouth 🙂

I’ve been waiting nearly eleven years for this moment. Eleven long, painful, humiliating years.

Ever since the doctor said, “you have a fourth degree tear,” in the delivery room as my firstborn son screamed and howled indignantly in the bassinet while I screamed and howled in the bed as the doctor began the slow and painful process of patching up my poor battered vagina.

(hear that? It’s the sound of my male readership quickly clicking away)

(it’s safe to come back now, guys, no more vagina talk)

My vagina healed* and my child, well, he continued to howl indignantly. Days and nights I spent bouncing, rocking, driving, singing, crying, all to no avail. Born with his days and nights mixed up, I spent a good 2 months up all night AND all day, so bleary and sleep-deprived that I walked into MORE walls than normal. I began to believe that my bed was a shimmering mirage, a figment of my addled imagination.

During those long days and nights, I fantasized about the ways I’d pay the kid back. Naked baby pictures festively on display in our hallway so I could show his one-day girlfriends (or boyfriends). Wedding speeches about how he used to poo in the tub and throw it out. Ways I could torture him when he decided – as all kids do – that I was the most annoying person in the world because OMG MOM, DO YOU HAVE TO BREATHE LIKE THAT?

We’ve finally hit the point in which everything from the way I chew to the way I walk is cause for embarrassment. HOW DARE YOU WALK LIKE THAT, MOM? YOU BRING SHAME UPON OUR HOUSE.

It’s pretty awesome – the kid has NO idea who he’s messing with. I’m not hurt or angry, no, I’m just ready to enact my revenge upon him. I mean, who takes issue with the way someone swallows?*

Yesterday, as I was scouring the Internet for the best (worst) picture of Lil Wayne, I got a phone call from his school. My heart sunk. We’ve got Plague House going on right now and the very last thing I feel like doing is managing ANOTHER sick person.

It was the secretary:

“Hi Miss Harks, I just spoke to the lunch lady.”

My heart thudded in my chest – what had the kid done? I LOVE the lunch ladies more than I love Equal, Orange Hostess Cuppy Cakes and my roses put together.

“And he’s got a balance on his school meals card that needs to be paid before we can feed him.”

Oh really? Way to tell me, kiddo.

“So if you want to drop off a check in the next 45 minutes, that would be great.”

I agreed to swing by, knowing that my kid would have a meltdown of the nuclear variety if he had to eat a cheese sandwich rather than whatever delicious hot-lunch items were offered. (I’ve tried to inform him that there are starving people in Africa who’d LOVE his cheese sandwich, but he just rolls his eyes at me. I think I may use the Sarah McLauchlan commercial to really drive the point home that his life? Not really so bad.)

I’m weeping just THINKING about it.

After I agreed to drop some cash off for the kid, I got ready to go. Before I walked out the door, I looked down at what I was wearing – black stretchy gauchos, ugly sweater slippers, and my pink Shut Your Whore Mouth (that’s a link to the shirts if you want one because obviously you do) shirt.

Did I dare?

Was it time?

Was THIS the moment I’d been waiting for?

Was I ready to enact my revenge upon the kid by showing up at school dressed like a schizophrenic off her meds?

Oh, it was tempting all right. I very nearly did.

But I remembered what it was like to be a kid and how annoying your parents are and how much worse I could make things if I showed up like that and made a grand show of kissing my kid on the cheek. So I changed into a boring blue shirt and jeans – the sweater boots stayed.

Besides, I’m waiting for the day that I actually own bunny slippers and can manage to put rollers in my hair. These teen years are going to be AWESOME.

*except that. Oops.

*my kid

————

Also: you should go comment here on my Savings.com post. Why? Because obviously.

Also also: you can read me here. The comments are breathtakingly horrible. Just – FYI.

I was standing there in line at The Target (also known as: my social life), daydreaming about rolling around in a pile of Equal when the cashier asked, “Ma’am, can I see your ID?”

I preened, flattered by this request.

“SURE, you can,” I smiled coyly at the kid behind the counter, not stopping to think for a second about it. Still in my fantasy world where Equal rained from the heavens, I hadn’t even begun to process WHY he’d be asking me for identification – I wasn’t writing a check. I didn’t have any booze. I didn’t even have a carton of smokes or anything. Still I smiled as I handed him my driver’s license.

He looked at me, a little aghast as he scanned my driver’s license, “It’s for the Nyquil,” he informed me.

My jaw dropped open as I did my best trout impression.

Robotripping (drinking the shit out of Dextromethorphan) had become popular just as I delivered my first son. I felt psychedelically wasted from lack of sleep – the last thing I wanted to try was to drink a couple bottles of cough syrup. I’d be more likely to vomit before I got high – that shit tastes like Satan’s Bunghole (unlike Equal, which tastes like the nectar of the Gods).

But I had friends who did it. And I was old enough to be all, *eye roll* “that’s lame.” Because it is. If you want to get wasted, you don’t drink 6 bottles of cough syrup – you drink a Bourbon + Vicodin Tonic. EVERYONE knows that.

A few kids later, I heard about sizzurp, thanks to my favorite rapper*, Lil Wayne.

I petitioned the Stop Medication Abuse board to use Lil Wayne’s picture in place of a warning: “possible side effects may include becoming Lil Wayne.” But so far, no luck.

And I will neatly sidebar into this: I have been doing amazingly well on my New Year’s resolution: do not become Lil Wayne. I wake up each morning and am STILL not Lil Wayne. I make the best resolutions ever.

But last night, as I was making out with my bottle of Nyquil because I couldn’t stand being up another night of having “Afternoon Delight” playing on repeat in my head and I saw it: another warning about medication abuse.

So rather than spend the night trying to gouge out my eyeballs with my fingernails to the soothing sounds of Starland Vocal Band, I instead laid awake for three and a half minutes (until the Nyqyil kicked in), trying to figure out how the shit kids could drink Nyquil and not go the fuck to sleep.

Like “HEY GUYS, LET’S GET WASTED ON SOME GREEN DEATH FLAVORED NYQUIL – THIS SHIT IS INTENSE.”

*ten minutes later*

“Zzzzzzzzzzzz.”

*eight hours later*

“Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

*twelve hours later*

“Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

*sixteen hours later*

“Fuck, my mouth tastes like a squirrel shit in it. That was one hell of a party. What the fuck day is it?”

Although, now that I think on it, throw in some adult diapers and that DOES sound like my kinda party.

*total lie

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time in the past few days sending out information about the Band Back Together Project to various media outlets. Sounds fancy, right? Not so much. Basically I have to talk about myself in the third person, which never makes anyone happy:

“Today, Aunt Becky, of Mommy Wants Vodka, poured vanilla extract into both her coffee AND her diet Coke, just to be on the safe side of drunk.”

Wicked, right?

Not so much.

But when I click the “email” button, it goes back to the mail program I once used on my very first computer, back in 2004. It’s a blast from the motherfucking past, Pranksters. I see love letters Daver once sent me. I have emails from people I haven’t spoken to in years. I have emails from my first blog. I can see where I spoke to people who no longer blog.

It’s like stepping back in time.

Especially when I see this:

And then this:

It’s not this child:

No.

It’s this one:

Time, it seems, waits for no one.

Not even little boys.

Friday night, well ensconced in our Friday Night Ritual (Dinner at Chili’s with Amelia and The Guy On My Couch, followed by a trip to The Target Store, which, of course, is a sacrosanct tradition), she marched around the store, proudly showing off her pink Starbucks Cake Pop.

No matter how full of my sour cream and cheese she is, she insists upon a Cake Pop that she eventually feeds to The Guy on the Couch. Pure happiness for a buck-fifty.

Can’t beat it.

She’d found herself a bright green sparkly hat which she proudly wore during the times that she hadn’t placed it upon the head of The Guy on the Couch – they’d been playing some game with it while I grabbed food for the week.

Eventually we wound our way, just as we always do, to the Legos. Carefully, she had to inspect each box to find the one that she wanted. She vacillated between a lighthouse and a dinosaur but eventually ended up choosing a teeny red speedboat. A good, solid careful choice.

Soon – too soon for me – it was time to go home. Lovingly, she’d placed the clearance Hello Kitty Backpack onto her back, marching toward the checkout with a bounce and a wiggle.

“Lookit my Pack-Pack, Mama! It’s HELLO KITTY.” She turned and swiveled around so that I could admire it as we stood there unloading the cart.

“It’s beautiful, Mimi-Girl,” I replied, just as I had the last twelve times she’d showed it off to me.

“Can I show Dada?” She asked coyly, fluttering her eyelashes at me. “He home from work yet?”

“Yes, Mimi,” I replied. “I just talked to him – we’re going to grab him some dinner to take home to him.”

“Can he put me to bed?” She asked for the fifty-fifth time that night.

“Yes, Baby, he can put you to bed,” I replied for the fifty-fifth time.

“Mama, we’re at sixteen,” she pointed at the check-out lane. “Dere’s five-teen and seventeen,” she carefully showed me. “Why?”

“You chose it, Mimi,” The Guy on my Couch who is endlessly patient with her questions. She tilted her head up to him coyly, “You like my Pack-Pack, Big Ben?”

“It’s beautiful, Mimi,” he replied for the thirty-eleventy-niner time.

She spun and twirled in front of the mirror next to her, admiring her Pack-Pack. “I love you, Hello Kitty Pack-Pack.” I giggled at her pronunciation of the word, “Backpack.”

Eventually she got tired of preening in front of the makeshift mirror and turned to the lady in line in front of us, who had been casually watching my daughter twirl and whirl.

“You like my Hello Kitty Pack-Pack?” Amelia asked.

“Yes, yes I do,” she smiled down at my beaming daughter.

She turned to me and spoke, “How old is she?”

“Just turned three,” I replied proudly.

“Man, she’s such a chatterbox. I can’t believe she talks so much! My child is about her age and she doesn’t speak quite so well.”

I beamed, ear-to-fucking-ear.

If she only knew.

If she only knew.

Because The Guy on my Couch has a job that requires a car, and I am benevolent enough to allow him to use mine, I’m stranded at my house most of the time. It’s okay – really. I get to indulge in my workaholic ways as much as I want without the pesky Real World getting in the way.

It’s okay until I have to go to the doctor. THEN, I have to ask my mother to drive me. Which, I tell everyone, is a condition of my parole, but that’s a lie – I’m on house arrest.

On Tuesday, my mother picked me up and took me to the endocrinologist so I could a) note that I’d gained 10 pounds, and 2) cry because I’d gained 10 pounds. Also: my 6 month check-up.

Of all my doctors, my endo is my favorite and not just because I get to People Watch in the waiting room and loudly proclaim – I HAVE A GLANDULAR PROBLEM in a high nasally voice (although that helps)(it’s not like I can be all I HAVE A VAGINA in my OB’s office)(it’s redundant).

Anyway.

Having a glandular problem not NEARLY as glamorous as you might think – I was ultimately convinced that my thyroid – that asshole – had taken off for greener, less diseased pastures. Like Detroit or Wyoming or something.

Turns out that I was wrong.

My thyroid is still firmly ensconced in my neck and, here’s where shit gets awesome, has grown a friend. His asshole friend carries a 5% risk of cancer. With friends like these, you don’t need enemies.

I’m sure it’s nothing. Probably a benign cyst or an oyster or diamond or something.

At least, I hope.

I sure do like diamonds. And horses. Not zebras. Never zebras.

My parents, when they remembered, measured my height on the back of the door to the basement. It was there that I could see how much I’d grown over the past years and a good way to be all, “I’m not THAT short” when my brother called me Stumpy. I was also, I recall, horrified by what my mother called “her handwriting.”

I’d probably do the same thing in my own house – for my KIDS, not ME – but all my doors are stained wood – nothing white here. So I have to do other things in order to see how much they’ve all grown.

Back in April, 2008, I bought myself Big Mac – a 24 inch computer that was hella awesomer than my previous computer – a 10 inch iBook with a broken screen. It was on that computer that I vowed I’d “write a book,” and “watch dancing kittens playing the piano.”

I did.

When I bought it, rather than simply take a picture of the technology, I decided to pose someone in front of it.

MUCH more interesting that way.

Also: SQUEE at chunky Baby Legs!

Alas, all good things must come to an end. Big Mac had been wheezing and choking along, trying to keep up with me as I beat on it day in and day out.

Last weekend, I’d finally had enough when, once again, Big Mac decided that I didn’t really NEED to be working any more (Big Mac LIES! I must! work! more!) for the eleventy billionth time that week. HOW DARE MY COMPUTER JUDGE ME FOR WORKING!

It was then that I realized Big Mac and I were soon to be parted.

Luckily I had just the thing to fix that.

Pranksters, meet Big Mac II.

Also: look at how far that chubby baby has come. He’s the one in the blue nerd shirt. His sister, Amelia, wasn’t even a twinkle in my eyes when Big Mac 1 came home.

(and no, that’s not Mountain Dew* OR pee in that bottle – it’s lemonade. They were playing “baby.”)

Amazing how far we’ve all come, isn’t it?

*my kids are NOT stoners.

Amelia loves books. Shocking, I know, since I’m barely literate, but there you have it: genetics are fucking weird.

Anyway, for her birthday, she got a good number of books. Being the last of three, it’s nice for her to get something that’s NOT a hand-me-down from her brothers, so she eagerly tears into them. And, really, anything else, but that’s neither here nor there.

I was laying on the couch trying to beat a particularly vicious level of Angry Birds on my iPad when she padded over and plopped a book – from her birthday – onto my lap. Politely she asked me to read it.

“Okay,” I said, giving the stink-eye to those stupid pigs on Angry Birds, “come on up.”

Wow. That’s fucking cute! I thought to myself as I began to read.

Aww, they’re friends. I bet this is gonna be an ebony/ivory kinda story – you can be friends with anyone! What a great moral that is for kids.

And now a monkey as a friend! Wow, what a great story this is. And the pictures? Amazaballs. Plus, I mean, a PRESENT? Who doesn’t love a good present?

Okay, now you’re losing me, book. Cooking is bullshit. CookBOOKs are bullshit. But okay, the kid prolly thinks this is great. I’ll soldier on.

Um.

WHAT?

I thought they were BFFOMGLOL. And now we’re talking about EATING our friends? What the shit kind of story IS this?

OMFG.

There’s dead mouse every-fucking-where! But! But! Mouse loved to PAINT! They were BFFLOLOMG!

How can you EAT your BFF?

I FEEL LIKE I’M GOING TO BARF.

It was then that I closed the book.

Who the hell WRITES these kind of books anyway?

*shudders*

In college, I had to take what I called, “Bible Class” and it was the first time I actually cracked open the Bible. Well, other than the times I read aloud random passages from the hotel rooms I was staying in (much, I should add, to the chagrin to whomever I happened to be staying with). Thank you I say now, o! wily Gideon’s, for supplying me with Bibles to read from to annoy my fellow travelers with.

I read the book cover to cover and learned a lot about what the rest of the religious world was talking about. Things that most of you probably just inherently knew, but for someone like me who grew up saying “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat” as a bastardized version of Grace, I simply was flabbergasted. There really is, I should add now, no fucking separation of church and state.

Anyway. I married someone who grew up in a family who is so religious that they’re probably still reeling from the PTSD from meeting me and finding out that yes, their son loves a heathen.

For Ash Wednesday one year, I was working on the floor and the pastor happened to be walking around giving out the cross on the forehead, and in the name of Trying Something New, I had decided to give up using “fuck” for Lent. It should go without saying that I am not Catholic, but I was reading the Bible and figured that it was a good idea to TRY it out.

Aunt Becky Gives Up The Eff Word:

The Daver: “What’s on your forehead?”

Aunt Becky: “Ashes.”

The Daver: “From?”

Aunt Becky: “I gave up using “fuck” for Lent.”

The Daver: “You know that means you can’t say it, right?”

Aunt Becky: “FUCK.”

Lent FAIL.

Aunt Becky Goes Crucifix Shopping:

The Daver: “Shit, I need to pick up something for the Christening on Sunday. Can you pick up something for my new Goddaughter?”

Aunt Becky: “Something…?”

The Daver: “Just go to the religious store in town and get her something.”

Aunt Becky: “Bwahahahahahahahahaha!”

The Daver: “You know, like a pearl something.”

Aunt Becky: “I’m going to go and get her a gigantic crucifix.”

The Daver: “No.”

Aunt Becky: “Like a gigantic BLEEDING crucifix for them to hang in her room.”

The Daver: “NO!”

Aunt Becky: “I want it to have like realistic blood and everything. I’m thinking something in the market of…8 feet tall and 6 feet wide. That should take up at least part of the wall of the nursery.”

The Daver: “Becky, that’s not funny.”

Aunt Becky: “Maybe they can hang it over her bassinet! To keep out The Devil. I think it would be lovely to watch over her.”

The Daver: “Becky, that’s really not funny at all.”

Aunt Becky: “Neither is sending me into a religious store. I don’t know FUCK about this shit, Dave. Besides, YOU are the Godfather, not me. Also, YOU are the heavenly one.”

The Daver: “Please?”

Aunt Becky: “Do you think this sort of crucifix is a custom job?”

Christening FAIL.

(ed note: Dave didn’t speak to me for an entire week. Also, I bought the kid a nice bracelet with a tasteful non-gory cross on it.)

What religion will Aunt Becky mess up next?

It’s like Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? except with RELIGION.

I cannot allow myself to be motivated by fear. If I do that, I’ll spend the rest of my life not trying to do something I really think I should be able to do – even if I suck.

So I’m going for it. I read your comments yesterday and they made me do the ugly cry (luckily, I have no photographic evidence to support this) but they were right. YOU were right. And I thank you for it.

I don’t like to half-ass things. I go balls to the wall, y’all or I go home.

Deep breath. Don’t panic.

It’s time to put those essays into a single document and work my ass off on them.

And I will.

Because you believe in me, I can believe in myself.

Anyone have any suggestions for me? How the shit do I find myself an agent (AGAIN)?