Read Between the Lines?

Since the ball and chain broke his foot, there is no way in hell that I have any time to do anything. I should be like it's only a few months and some women do this all the time. Well those women are different from me because apparently they don't sleep or their children are robots who do not leave crumbs and sticky stuff everywhere and they do not have things to do like eating and going to school. Certainly those children do not argue, whine, or look at one beseechingly, as if threatening to expose Mom's mediocrity to future therapists, ad infinitum.

I'd like to know what happened to Little House on the Prairie? I hated those books. Everyone was so generous and kind and inherently impossible for a person with my character to relate to. But they did manage to get a helluva lot done. What was their secret? Even if Pa had busted his ankle, dontcha just know that Ma would have managed to feed those smarmy brats? Even if she was on the rag and had to go back to the outhouse every hour to deal with said rag?

Fortunately, a friend came to visit me for a coupla nights. She is a fellow sloth and encouraged my decadence, including "I Love Lucy" DVDs and pizza. She left this morning, though, and I found myself in K-mart shopping for toilet paper, junky shelves to help us pretend my daughter's room is larger than a walk-in closet, and sexy, loose-fitting sweatpants for the gimpy husband. I bought necessities in bulk. I bossed the kids. By the time we left I was ready to go back to bed for the night, but it was noon time.

The blog started with the idea that women don't talk enough about certain things. Yet this is the stuff we talk about all the time: I have too much shit to do. Does anybody thank the pharmaceutical industry? Does anyone say Hallelujah, Welbutrin? Without it, I would be folding and re-folding one piece of laundry; but with it, I am able to cook, shop, clean, counsel, and manage all sorts of self-care activities (brushing my teeth, for example). I'm like that mom from Desperate Housewives who takes her kid's ADHD meds. I am ethically superior, however, because these were legally prescribed to me. My mind, like my bedroom, was genuinely in disorder. And lo, like the Desperate gal, I can rush my tuchas (ass) all over the place doing motherly errands.

I am thinking that the secret of Laura Ingalls Wilder was not the devout belief in the Puritan work ethic, but perhaps the motivating and organizing medications that Pa brought back after the hunt. There was that episode when she complained of dry mouth and the long wait at the pharmacy wagon. Certainly there must have been something other than meat drying in preparation for the winter. I'm considering looking back at the books and giving Ms. Wilder another chance. Even on the t.v. series, Michael Landon looked a little baked to me. His hair was so long - he must have been doing drugs! And the wife - she stayed so calm. Not because of her faith in Michael helping her career, but because she knew at some point someone would score her something so she could stand being on the set with that little prissy Gilbert girl. That was the episode when the traveler called him a 'hippie-repressed fried husband,' and they ended up breaking brownies together.

Fuggetabout it - all those Stepford wives and their ilk were morons because they were too fucking tired to give a shit. No drugs, no time, no no no. Write me up as this week's winner of the Rumpled Apron Award.

Calgon, take me away!