.

I'm coming down from having one of the most frustrating conversations I've ever had with another human being. Nevermind that said human being is a 5 year old boy that is too smart for his own good. Suddenly he's figured everything out, all the world's secrets. Every single one of them. And let me tell you, he is PISSED. He's furious that we've all been lying to him since the moment he took his first breath only 5 short years ago. He's been thinking about the whole Santa thing for quite a while now and according to him, none of it makes any sense. No one can actually fit down a chimney, there's no workshop full of elves making toys that we can just buy at Target. It's all fake.

This parenting thing is a real adventure, let me tell ya. One minute you're cruising along, cutting sandwhiches into tiny little christmas trees and for their lunches and feeling like parent of the year because you haven't even forgotten to move the elf once this season. Next thing you know, you're in a full on blizzard of emotions because a 5 year old is yelling at you and accusing you of sitting on a throne of lies.

So I told him the truth. I told him it's all pretend and just for fun and that he better not tell his older sister or his best friends across thr street because they believe so hard and it would destroy them in the same way it would if he unwrapped all their Christmas presents for them. "It's not even about the presents. It's about family, food and animals anyway," he said.

He has the biggest heart and like I said, he's too smart for his own good.

He's right though.

Remember to love your people this season. Spend time with them. Tell them how proud and grateful you are to have them in your life.

The Gift of Murder

There are few things in this life that bring me more joy than finding a perfect gift for someone or getting a really great bargain. If there's one thing that stresses me out (Who am I kidding? There are a million things that stress me out.), it's buying gifts for other children. You never really know what they already have, you question their interests, and because you're a parent you know they will only really like what you buy them for maybe 10 minutes and then it will sit in a toy box for a year before going to Goodwill.

Recently, my son was invited to a party by one of his school friends, a boy we will refer to as Charlie in order to protect his identity and to keep anyone from ever tracing any future crimes he might commit back to my unintentional influence.  Charlie is turning 5 and having this super fun party and he has these great parents who put a lot of effort and time into this incredible party. We go out shopping maybe a day or two before this party for other things and stop by the Dollar Tree. 

As I am sauntering down the aisles filled with all the treasures 4 shiny quarters will buy,  a book on one of the shelves catches my eye. It looks like a hard cover children's picture book, a rare find at the Dollar store. As I reach for it, I notice the name of the author printed down the spine of the book is Bruce Springsteen. Say what?! A children's picture book by Bruce Springsteen for $1?! On the cover was a picture of a cute little baby named "Outlaw Pete." A cute book about a bad little baby reminded me of one of Jack's favorite movies at the moment, Boss Baby. I grabbed two of those babies and tossed them in my cart, one for Jack and one for little Charlie. 

We had a busy week and never had a chance to read our copy of Outlaw Pete. On Monday night, I received an email from little Charlie's mom saying that "Jack was such an awesome kid, so kind, so fun, yada yada yada..." I mean, he is pretty great though. She goes on to thank us for the Lego set and the slime kit but when she gets to the book she suspiciously asks "was the book meant for Charlie or was it your book that was accidentally put in the bag?"

My first thought was, "No freakin way! Did someone write in the book? Is that why it was at the Dollar store? I knew it was too good to be true."

Then I thought... "That's a really weird thing to ask someone." So I sent Ryan up to grab our unread copy of Outlaw Pete. I watched in horror as his face grew more and more red and his chest heaved with awkward silent laughter as he read the book. 

Finally I couldn't take it any longer and I began to panic, "Oh my god. What does it say? What's wrong with it?"

He smirked as he handed it to me and told me to read it for myself. 

The book started off ok. A cute little baby robs a bank, gets arrested and then eventually breaks out of prison and goes on the lamb. Not so bad, right? I thought the baby would eventually wake up from a dream, or his mother would call him inside and shake him out of his daydream.

No such luck. The baby grows into a man while living his life on the run from Johnny Law. He meets a Navajo girl and decides to settle down and start a family. Turn a new leaf, if you will. Not so fast Outlaw Pete! You don't just get to rob banks, leave a body count in your wake and live a life on the run and just decide that one day you're above all that nonsense. Oh no, that is not how life works mister! There's this little thing called Karma that always finds you.

One day, New Leaf Pete is fishing down by the river when Bounty Hunter Dan rides up on him with his gun out and orders to capture Pete. This is when the real gem of the story occurs. Pete pulls his knife out and whips it through the air like it's some kind of ninja star and it lands right in the center of Dan's chest. Direct hit straight to the heart. In case I didn't accurately paint that picture for you, here's the actual illustration for the book:

Just in case you didn't get a good look from that illustration, they give you a close up on the next page:

After Dan lays dying in a pool of his own blood, a sly grin of defeat across his face, Pete mounts his horse and takes off.

Outlaw Pete rides until he realizes there just isn't a way to outrun Karma. Everyone must eventually atone for their sins. As he rests on horseback atop a snowy mountain, he contemplates life and all his dirty deeds. Pete realizes the only way out is to jump, and so he rides his horse over the icy cliff to his death in the valley below.

Murder, suicide, bank robbing babies, a man dying in a pool of his own blood..... What more could you ask for in a children's book?

I emailed little Charlie's mom back.

"Oh.my.god!!!!!!!! I am so sorry, What kind of book did I buy for your child? I take full responsibility if he knifes anyone at school tomorrow or steals anyone's juice box."

There is a moral to this story. Buy kids candy, legos, slime, anything except a book! At the very least, maybe read the book first. I would tell you not to buy books from the Dollar Store but I went back after this incident and found another book that might be even more exciting than Outlaw Pete. I bought one for myself and one to gift to someone special. Who wants to be that special someone?

Christmas Miracles

 “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” - Anne Lamott

Christmas. Jesus. Let me tell you something about Christmas. It comes with bright lights, food smorgasbords, sometimes snow, and packages with big bows wrapped up in pretty paper printed with cute little forest animals. Packages full of hopes and dreams. You know what's really in those beautiful gift wrapped boxes? Disappointment. Shattered dreams pop out of those glossy little gift bags like deranged Jack in the boxes. Those cute little forest animals are a fraud. Forest animals are salty little bitches. They don't wrap packages and throw snowballs. They will eat your face off. Honestly, I don't know what anyone really expects from a holiday that starts off by shoving a tree up an angel's ass and ends with you inviting a fat, bearded stranger to come into your house for fresh hot cookies while you sleep. Christmas. Fucking Christmas.

The first time Christmas shattered my dreams, I was only 4 years old. Seriously, it didn't waste any time. Just decided to jump right in and start ruining my life right from the start. The year was 1988 and I desperately wanted an Easy Bake Oven. Look... I know what you're thinking... you've heard me tell this story a million times already but I don't care. This was a pivotal moment in the course of my life. This is why I'm crazy! Anyway... if you're all done interrupting... I was 4, it was 1988 and the world was really weird. My parents were constantly separating, only to get back together a short time later. That Christmas, the only thing my tiny little heart desired was an Easy Bake Oven. That's it! Not world peace, not a million dollars, just an Easy Bake Oven for baking all the treats and burying my feelings under mountains of baked goods. Christmas morning arrived with all it's pretty packages and I tore into my gifts like one of those salty little badgers on the wrapping paper. Finally, as I sit in a pile of my own destruction, I get to the very last gift. This has to be it!! All my dreams were about to come true. I could actually feel it happening in my soul and my stomach which was already rumbling with hungry anticipation. I ripped the paper off the box and there... in big purple letters were those three magic words... EASY BAKE OVEN. I shouted with joy and jumped up and down. That's when I noticed a sly smirk on my mother's face.

"Open the box," she said.

Um... I don't need to open it, I know what's inside. It's printed right there on the box! Can't you read woman?!?!

 "You should probably open the box," she insisted.

So, I opened the box. The suspiciously light weight box. I peered down inside that dark empty box and found a dress folded up at the bottom. No oven, no brownies. Just a dress and sadness.

As the years passed, I remained hopeful. Surely that incident was a one time thing. I would not allow that traumatic event to overshadow my love for Christmas.  It was all my mother's fault anyway. She's the Grinch in this holiday special. The following year, I asked for a scooter but on Christmas morning I awoke to find a letter saying that Rudolph stepped on the scooter and broke it "so don't waste any time looking under the tree because it ain't there." It was signed "Santa" but the handwriting looked a lot like my mother's handwriting. The next year, I asked for a Barbie Dream House. If my real life home couldn't be a dream, then at least let me live vicariously through Barbie. Christmas morning came but my Dream House never did. Until... nearly 10 years later when it arrived under the tree with my little sister's name on it. This sister didn't even like Barbies, she desecrated the Dream House by piling all her nude dolls inside it like a giant freak orgy. Barbie deserved so much better than that. That same Christmas my sister also got the scooter that I asked for all those years ago. Apparently it takes 10 years to repair a scooter. Maybe Santa needs to hire some new elves and think about how his actions affect other people.

I held on tight through those troubled years and kept my eyes fixed on the future. I couldn't wait to be an adult and make my own decisions. Couldn't wait to take control of my home life and build that dream house for myself instead of waiting around for Santa to deliver it. Despite my optimism, Christmas continued to let me down. I met my future husband when I was 17, we celebrated our first Christmas together a few years later after graduating high school and moving into and apartment. We put up a small Chrismtas tree and hung our stockings on the wall since we didn't have a fireplace.  I put a lot of thought and care into the gifts I chose for him. He bought me a bottle of vodka in hopes that the two of us could share.

The next year he took me home for Christmas to spend a week with his parents. I was both nervous and excited to finally be celebrating Christmas with a family that didn't invite my mother over. As soon as we walked in my dog, who we brought with us, peed right on the marble floors. While my boyfriend's mother cleaned up the urine my dog pooped in front of the fire place, right under the stockings.

That night we all gathered around the beautifully decorated dining table for Christmas dinner. Now, here's the thing that you should know about me... I am from a pretty big family, several big families actually because my parents have both been married 4 times. I'm used to people shoving each other out of the way to get to the front of the line so they don't miss out on the mac and cheese. We typically eat off paper plates or mismatched dishes and sit wherever we can find a spot. Don't even get me started on desserts, I will cut someone for a piece of pie. That's probably why we use plastic utensils. So we sat down to eat this fancy dinner around this fancy table in the actual dream house and there are like 42 different forks and 6 plates and a bowl, even though I'm not eating anything that requires a bowl. I looked down at all the plates tried to use my best deductive reasoning (but I failed math so many times that I don't even know if that's the correct kind of reasoning to use in a situation such as this). There was a large gold plate on the bottom and another white plate on top of the gold plate. I deduced that the gold plate must be a decorative charger, so I grabbed the white plate and started piling on the mashed potatoes.

That's when his mother chuckled and said "You're using the wrong plate! The gold plate is for your meal, the white plate is for salad."

"Oh," I laughed nervously, "I thought the massive gold plate was the dessert plate." I always try to lighten the mood with a joke when I feel uncomfortable. It's this really great talent that I have.

While everyone laughed at my funny joke (it happens to me a lot), I looked down at my silverware with dread as I tried to determine which fork to use. I recalled that scene from Pretty Woman where the concierge tries to teach the sex worker, also known as Julia Roberts, how to use different silverware before she goes to a fancy dinner. I wondered silently if she started from the outside and worked her way in, just like she did with the high society life, or did she start on the inside and work her way out? My memory is amazing, it likes to recall the most horrific and embarrassing moments from my entire life as I am trying to sleep at night but decided to take the holiday off apparently because I could not remember which fork she started with. I took a chance, grabbed a fork and dug in.

Another laugh echoed from across the table, "You're using the wrong fork too!"

I cried the entire 18 hour drive home the next day. I do not give up easily though so I went ahead and married the boyfriend and had two kids with him. Finally I got to be the mother in this Christmas story and I was determined to have a fresh start with the holiday. No more letters from "Santa" about crushed scooters and shattered dreams. I came downstairs with my baby bright and early that first Christmas morning, dressed in her cute Christmas pajamas. I gave her a bottle so she would be full and happy while we opened gifts. Just as we were unwrapping the first gift of Christmas, the baby vomited sour smelling, white formula all over me and her cute Christmas jammies.

For about 5 years now, maybe even longer, Christmas seemed to be backing off a bit. I loved watching how excited my kids were every Christmas morning as they unwrapped packages filled with love and joy and toys they would never play with again but would also never let me throw away. I shouldn't have let my guard down. I should have known better. As soon as I saw that bright blue leather jacket, I should have run the other way.

This year my husband bought himself a bright blue leather jacket, probably handsewn out of old Ikea bags from child slaves in a scorching hot factory in China. The jacket smelled like down river trash mixed with hot raw dog vomit and had to be hung outside to air out for weeks. We've been together for 17 years now so I've mastered my eye roll and gotten really good at ignoring his kind of crazy so that's how I handled this obvious midlife crisis. The night after the 25th is when the true gift of Christmas arrived. While I tried to find places in my house to stuff all the new toys, my husband came in from the garage where I assumed he had been visiting his new jacket. Instead of smelling garbage, I caught a whiff of smoke when he leaned in to kiss me on the cheek.

"Why do you smell like smoke?" I asked.

He walked into the kitchen and started putting away dishes like he's suddenly no longer having a mid life crisis. "Cuz I was smoking," he said with a grin that matched the smell of his sewer jacket.

"Smoking what?" I interrogated further.

"You know...." he said. This time, I swear I saw an actual turd in his teeth when he flashed that grin at me.

"No, I do not know Mr. Identity Crisis. Why don't you tell me...." I was not going to do any favors for him, even if he did just learn how to put away dishes for the first time.

"You know... the smoke."

"Oh, you mean pot? You're smoking pot?" Ok fine, I helped a little but I am short and it's nice to not have to get a chair to reach the top shelf to put away dishes.

Here's the thing... I was raised by a whole slew of parents. I've literally seen all the shit that life has to throw at a person. Addiction runs rampant in my family. Getting a DUI is literally a family tradition. I was raised to believe that if you work hard then you have the right to party just as hard as you worked. Drinking and smoking pot is totally acceptable if it's done responsibly and in moderation. This guy though, this guy that I married nearly ten years ago and have spent more than half my life with.... he doesn't do anything responsibly or in moderation. He has already had two DUI charges and two marijuana posession charges. He got each one right before I got pregnant with each of my kids so we like to joke that they are my DUI babies. Like he rewarded me with children each time he screwed up.

After the last arrest, I told him I was done with the partying. No more DUIs, no drinking and driving at all. I also tried to be reasonable (because I am an actual angel) and compromise with him that if he didn't buy weed or have it in the house or in our cars then I wouldn't give him a hard time if he went camping with friends and decided to smoke out in the middle of the woods somewhere.

This year Santa delivered a late Christmas gift. It was packaged in a bow that smelled like marijuana smoke and filled with 17 years worth of lies that just came spilling out like clowns in a car or one of those freakin magician's scarves. I found out that this husband of mine is "addicted to lying and marijuana" his words, not mine, and that he is also a world class asshole (my words). So, I kicked him out and I have no idea what happens next or if I should let him come home or divorce him, so I'm just going to sit here and wait 350+ days for the next miracle that Christmas brings my way or until my therapist calls me back, whichever comes first.

Happy Hanukkah or something.


p.s. Anyone need a leather jacket? I have a really ugly one for sale. Made out of 100% recycled Ikea bags and garbage.