I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression (19 page)

The whole affair was humiliating.

We went to a neighborhood gathering and noted with some embarrassment and shock that they were wife-swapping. One by one a couple would slip off until finally there was only my husband playing “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” on a five-string ukelele and me eating the leftover canapés on everyone’s paper plate. We went home without speaking a word to one another.

That night I had a dream in which my husband and
I awoke in a world where everyone had entered a commune … and no one wanted us.

The two of us wandered from one group to another begging to join their free society only to be rejected for one reason or another.

At one commune, we almost made it. The leader looked at us closely and said, “In a commune, we all work in various capacities. Some women tend children, others cook, others clean house, others do laundry. In what capacity would you like to work?” she asked, turning to me.

“Do you have any openings for sex objects?” I asked.

“Hah!” snarled my husband. “With that line you could get the Nobel prize for humor.”

Turning to my husband, the leader asked, “And you, sir, what are some of your talents that would be considered contributions to our group. Chopping wood? Building fires? Harvesting crops?”

“I can play ‘The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise’ on a five-string ukelele,” he said.

“Don’t be modest,” I interrupted. “He can also watch two hundred televised football games in a single weekend without fainting. He can reseat a commode with Play Doh, and he can make himself invisible when it comes time to take out the garbage.”

“We are a sharing society,” said the leader in a soft voice.

“Did you hear that, Harlow?” I asked, nudging my husband. “A sharing society. That’s not going to be easy for a man who sleeps with his car keys.”

“You should talk,” he barked. “We were married twelve years before you let me drink out of your Shirley Temple mug.”

“Please,” said the leader of the commune, holding up her hand in a sign of peace, “I don’t think a commune
is the place for you two. You are compatibly incompatible.”

“Which means?” asked my husband.

“Which means you are too married to live in peace and harmony.”

The rest of the dream was a nightmare. We are the last two married squares on the face of earth living in a swinging free-marriage-less society. When we check in at a hotel, bellhops snicker when they see we have luggage. Managers stiffen when we sign our names Mr. and Mrs. and say, “We don’t want your kind in our hotel.” Our children are taunted by cruel playmates who chant, “My Mommy says Your Mommy and Daddy are living in wedlock. Yeah yeah!”

I awoke suddenly from the dream to the voice of my husband who said, “For crying out loud, what’s that car doing parked in our driveway? They’re just sitting there looking.”

“Well, who do you think they are?” I shouted. “They’re tourists from the commune here to look at the married freaks.”

I’m the mother of no. 39’s football pants
. A woman leaned over at the high school football game last week and said, “Hi, aren’t you the mother of no. 39’s football pants?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You don’t know me,” she said, “but our sons share the same pants. You see, my Boyd sits on the bench while your son sits in the bleachers and the next week Boyd sits in the stands while your son gets to sit on the bench.”

“I see,” I nodded.

“What kind of bleach do you use for the stains?”

“Just a pre-soak,” I said, “and then my regular detergent.”

“I thought so,” she said. “A few weeks ago, you overdid.”

“Weren’t the pants clean?” I asked.

“They were too clean, dear. The boys complained. When they’re too white it looks like they never play.”

“I’ll watch it,” I said.

“Have you met any of the other mothers yet?”

“No.”

“Well, over there is the mother of 71. She has pants all to herself. He’s the captain, you know. Beside her is the grandmother of 93’s. He got the new stretch ones. They’re trying them out. Wonderful woman. Comes to every game. And of course you know the mother of no. 15’s pants. She’s the quarterback’s mother. Her pants take a beating. At the first away game, they were dragged in the mud twenty-three yards before they were finally ripped.”

“Well I never,” I said.

“Listen, don’t worry about the red stains on the left knee this week.”

“Blood?” I asked.

“Jelly bun,” she said. Then she added, “You know when women like us have so much in common, we ought to get together more often. Why don’t you call me, and we can chat over lunch.”

“What’s your name?” I called after her.

“Alternate bench mother of 39’s pants. I’m in the book!”

I’m an illegible name tag
. My husband and I are veterans of innumerable school functions (he being in education). That means something like a simple coffee after a flute concert is turned into a ceremony, second only to a national political convention.

Miss Prig is in charge of fashioning small name tags shaped like tulips out of colored construction paper which
are pinned to your back. Then Mr. Flap, the football coach, announces that on one side is the name of a famous personality. You are to mingle throughout and by asking questions of each guest find out who you are … an ice breaker, so to speak. When the game is finished, you then turn the name tag to the other side, and
voilà!
you know who you are.

Invariably, Miss Toasty, who is in charge of straight pins, blows it, and seventy-five adults are circulating around a room with one arm behind their backs asking painfully, “Am I living? Am I in politics?”

Actually, I question the value of name tags as an aid to future identification. I have approached too many people who have spent the entire evening talking to my left bosom. I always have the insane desire to name the other one. It is most disconcerting. Without ever looking at my face, they will say, “Hello there, so you are Edna Bondeck.”

“No,” I will say, smiling engagingly at their left bosom, “I am Erma Bombeck.”

“Don’t tell me,” they say. “You are related to that tall man over there with a crick in his right arm from holding the name tag behind him.”

“Right,” I say, my eyes never leaving their tag for a moment, “and you are Fruit of the Loom.”

“No, that’s a label from my underwear that got stuck in my name tag while my arm was behind my back. Are you new in the area?”

“Yes I am. And it’s wonderful meeting so many new chests … er, people.”

“I’m sure it is. See you around.”

The entire evening is a faceless one. At the end I say good-by to the blonde with the exceptional posture, the braless militant, the chest of hair under the body shirt and kcebmoB lliB.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” says my husband. “It’s me with my name tag upside down.”

I looked carefully into his face. “Oh yeah. Let me see some identification.”

I’m Edna
. My mother-in-law and I have a great relationship. She calls me Edna and I call her on her birthday, Mother’s Day, and Christmas.

At the wedding when she insisted they put a funeral flag on the fender of her car and drove with her lights on, I sensed somehow I was not what she would have chosen for her son.

But, God love her, she has a sense of humor and somehow we have all survived. She has accepted me for what I am. A mistake. And I have learned to live with her through the miracle of sedation.

One of her idiosyncracies, however, I will never adjust to. I call it her Last Breath Performance.

Check this. I am driving the car and she is sitting beside me. Out of the clear blue sky, I hear her suck in her breath, moan slightly and slump, steadying her head with her hand. I wait, but she doesn’t exhale.

The first time this happened I figured (a) She was leaving the car on a permanent basis; (b) I had closed the electric windows on a gas-station attendant and was towing him by his fingers; (c) We were being followed by a tornado funnel.

Instinctively, I jammed on the brakes of the car, nearly hurling her through the windshield, turned around, grabbed her by the shoulders, and shouted hysterically, “What’s the matter?”

“Darn it,” she said, “I just remembered I forgot to lock my back door.”

During subsequent drives, I was to learn that she gasped and groaned at girls in shorts, roses in full bloom, a half stick of gum discovered in her raincoat, and the
realization that tomorrow was her sister-in-law’s birthday.

She didn’t limit her Last Breath Performance to the car.

When she watched television or read the newspaper, she would inhale noisily, freeze, put her hand over her mouth, and say, “How do those poor people in Needles, California, stand the heat?”

I pride myself on being able to live in peace with my mother-in-law, and she puts up with me. The other day we were driving together, when she sucked in her breath, clutched her purse, and mumbled, “Oh my!”

Figuring she had just remembered her dental appointment, I kept moving and promptly smacked into a truck pulling out from the alley.

She shook her head and made a clicking noise with her tongue. “I tried to warn you, Edna, but you wouldn’t listen.”

I’m the dog’s mother
. As everyone knows I hold the record for the longest post-natal depression period ever. I could hardly wait for the Empty Nest Syndrome at which time I was going to climb in it, eat bourbon balls before breakfast, watch soap operas, and eventually run away with a vacuum cleaner salesman.

On the day the Empty Nest became a reality, I found to my horror there was a dog in it—which the family explained would keep me company. I needed company the way a man reading
Playboy
needed his wife to turn the pages for him.

The dog was friendly enough, had fair manners, and was playful. He only had one hang-up. He had to be let in and out of the house 2,672 times a day.

Some dogs have a blade-of-grass complex. They can’t seem to pass one without stopping and making it glisten. This beast never passed a door without scratching it,
jumping up to the door handle and howling like he only had two seconds before he would no longer be responsible for what happened.

At the end of the first day I was near exhaustion. I had not gotten the breakfast dishes cleared off the table, the beds made, or the laundry started.

“I’ll bet you were playing all day with that dog,” teased my husband.

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Look at the way that little dickens is jumping up and down.”

“He is aiming for your throat. He wants out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. He just came in.”

Finally, the dog let out a shriek that took off the tops of our heads and threw himself at the door.

Mechanically, I opened up the door and stood there with my hand on the knob.

He gave another yap and I opened up the door and he was in again.

“Why did he want in after you just let him out?” asked my husband.

“Why do fairies dance on the lawn? Why is the Pope always a Catholic? Why indeed?” The dog yipped and I opened the door for him to leave again.

“You mean to tell me it’s this way all day?”

I nodded, at the same time opening the door so he could bounce in again.

“I got it,” said my husband snapping his fingers. “We’ll go out when he goes in and when he comes out we’ll go in. That way we’ll confuse him into not knowing if he is in or out.”

Standing there huddled in the darkness on the cold porch scratching with our paws to get in, I tried to figure where I went wrong. I think it was when my mother said, “Grab him. You’re not getting any younger.”

I’m room service in tennis shoes
. “What in heaven’s name is that hanging over your dirty-clothes hamper?” asked Mother. “It looks like a basketball hoop made out of a bent coat hanger.”

“It’s a basketball hoop made out of a bent coat hanger,” I said.

“It looks terrible.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I said. “You don’t have to run through dirty underwear in your bare feet or find the laundry before you can do it. When the boys improve on their hook shots, I’ll have it made.”

“What’s this?” she scowled.

“You mean that bar across the door you just cracked your head on? It’s an exercise bar so the boys can build up their muscles.”

“And this ironing board,” she persisted. “Don’t you ever get tired of falling over it? Want me to take it down?”

“What for?” I asked. “We’re not moving.”

The trouble with Mother is she has forgotten what it is to live in a house furnished in Contemporary Children. I used to fight it too. At one time I was so naïve I thought only edible things belonged in the refrigerator, bicycles without wheels should be discarded, and if you had eight people to dinner, all the glasses had to match.

I went crazy trying to keep an antiseptic house in a wet shoestring world. Then one day I was doing cafeteria duty with a mother of six children who said a curious thing. “I wonder how my kids will remember me. Will they remember me as a Mother who never had rings around the bathtub or will they remember the popcorn we ate in the living room?