two things I’m thankful for today
Posted on March 23, 2007
Filed Under Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club, kids, parenting, snark, suburban joys | 3 Comments
A Blogher post on gratitude has me thinking that it’s time I confess to being thankful for something. Anything. I wouldn’t want my audience to worry that I may be planning to jump off a cliff or drive myself and my children into the bottom of a lake with the windows rolled up.
So here are two things I’m feeling thankful for today.
#1
I am thankful for a dead fish named Robby that is now in my freezer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not thankful that he’s dead in the straight up, Oh-joy-I-don’t-have-to-take-care-of-that-damn-fish-anymore kind of way. I’m thankful for the sorrow that his passing elicited in my O. (That sounds bad too, let me explain.) Just when I was beginning to think that O had completed his transformation into Judd Nelson character from The Breakfast Club, his fish dies and he sobs and gulps and asks to be left alone with Robby to say his goodbyes and I am reminded that there is still a sweet, sensitive, compassionate individual in that little boy body. I needed to see the softer side of O. It had been eclipsed by sarcasm and surliness for the last few weeks. I find it easy to forget that O is only seven, when he has so seamlessly adopted the attitude of an adolescent. So R.I.P. Robby, there beside the frozen blueberries and the Eggo waffles. We’ll bury you properly beneath the tulip tree when the ground thaws. 
#2
I am thankful that I am NOT my neighbor BB. It’s not that BB doesn’t live kind of a charmed life with four great kids, a doting husband, a terrific house they built themselves. It’s not that BB is constantly shaming me with her selflessness. In addition to mothering four children (two of which she adopted from Korea), she teaches English as a Second Language, is the host mother to an A Better Chance student in out town, is an esteemed and active member of her church and helps her husband run their design and construction business in her free time. So there’s a lot to learn from BB and perhaps I should want to be her, BUT, after spending an evening at BB’s house, I came home eternally grateful that it was BB, not I, that was deemed competent enough to handle her household.
During the three hours that we drank a few glasses of wine and ate too much pizza, BB’s two youngest children, boys she has lovingly dubbed “The Weasels”, turned the house completely upside down. Weasel One, who is nearly three, peed on the bathroom floor, wiped it up with a stray sock and then threw the sock in the toilet. While Weasel Two, who is almost 2, washed all his big sister’s Webkinz in the bathtub, soaking the entire bathroom and then proceeded to blow them dry while standing in an inch deep puddle of water. BB just sighed and shrugged and said, “Until there’s water dripping through the ceiling above our heads, I’m just going to leave them alone.” She poured another glass of wine.
After supper BB pulled out the kettle to make some tea, only to find that The Weasels had stuffed all the Box Top coupons she had been saving for the elementary school fund raiser into the kettle that was already full with water. A year’s worth of clippings melted together in one big soggy cardboard slump. She laughed.
By the end of the evening, Weasel One was fully naked sitting on the kitchen counter eating Captain Crunch from the box and Weasel Two was emptying the recycling bin in the mudroom and pushing cans and bottles and yogurt containers through the dog door. I scurried home to the calm and the clean that is my house and breathed a deep sigh of relief, thanking the gods that I am not BB.
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