Angel, Angel, Down We Go Together

When I was a little girl, at the beginning of the Christmas season I would always ask my mother, "Aren't you excited about Christmas?" and she would always answer, "Honey, Christmas is for children." I vowed right then and there not to become a boring old grown-up who couldn't enjoy Christmas. Well, that just went right out the window this Christmas, or as my dear friend N calls it, "Stress-mas".



This particular day was, without a doubt, the zenith of stressful days...(keep in mind that this happened about a week before Christmas)

First thing in the morning Tony and I were fighting because he can't manage to put the cork-screw away after he opens a bottle of wine. Seriously. I mean, I can (sort-of) tolerate it when he doesn't put his dirty clothes in the hamper, or when he leaves the garage door open or doesn't hang up his coat...but when he does all of those things AND leaves the stupid fucking cork-screw on the counter right above the drawer where it actually belongs...well, that just made me want to take out his eyeball with the thing. And this fight wasn't even just a snide little comment on my part which would have been completely ignored by my husband, it was full-on yelling and dredging up past slights (by both of us, I might add lest I sound like some sort-of cork-screw wielding bitchy shrew). Thankfully the kids were at school so they didn't witness the insanity.

Then I went to my stupid-ass job, where everything went okay until 15 minutes before I left and the one person I work with that I do not like was really, really rude to me. I made a useless but pointed remark to her about it, but then I had to leave. Needless to say I thought of all sorts of wonderful come-backs in the car on my way to pick up Brenna from school, which just made me re-live the moment and made me madder.

So, in the car pick-up line at school I pulled out the newspaper and started to read it thinking that would calm me down. But NO!! The line moved forward and I didn't notice because I was reading my paper, so the bitch in the white family-van behind me honked and waved her arms in the air and the ugly bitch in the even uglier family van behind her whipped out of line and went around me--and when she got next to my Durango she stared at me and mouthed some choice words while she pulled in front of me. What the fuck? Who gives a shit if we move up a car-length or not? Besides, the idiot in the van behind me could see I was reading the paper, what was she so pissed off for? She could have just tapped the horn to get my attention and smiled at me when I looked at her in my rear-view mirror and I would have gladly moved up. Stupid bitch. I saw which kid got in her van when school let out and believe me, the extra car-lengths worth of steps he took didn't hurt his fat-ass any. From the looks of him, he should've been walking home just to get the exercise. I just wanted to gun my SUV into the back of the ugly mom's van in front of me and then throw it in reverse and smash the idiot behind me too. I tried to console myself with the fact that I probably weigh 50 pounds less than either of them, but since they were both still giving me dirty looks it wasn't easy.

Okay...on with the mardi-gras that was my day. I called Tony to find out if he had called his mother to find out what she wanted for Christmas and he informed me that she had slipped on the ice the night before and her neighbor took her to the hospital and now she was laid up with staples in her head and a concussion. Yikes! (On the funny side, Tony did suggest that maybe we should get her a helmet for Christmas.) So I told Tony to go straight to her house after work and take her some dinner. I would take Brenna to dance, then Bronte and I would pick her up and we would go to The Fortune Kookie for pot-stickers (just us girls!) and then we would drive to church so Brenna could rehearse with the adult choir because she was singing in a trio for part of the Christmas Cantata that Sunday. Whew!

Jump forward to The Fortune Kookie. The girls and I had just ordered when my cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and it said it was my mother's house. Seeing as she lives with my Alzheimer's ridden father who doesn't hold conversations anymore (sadly) I figured she just called to chat. She calls me upwards of 5 times a day sometimes. Sometimes she calls to tell me what is on TV. For example...in the month of December right up until Christmas Eve I got a phone call every night from my 77 year old mother. The phone would ring at 6:55 p.m. every night and she would say, "Charlie Brown Christmas is on channel 2 in 5 minutes. I just thought the girls would like to watch. OK. Bye!" Granted, it wasn't a Charlie Brown Christmas every night. Sometimes it was Frosty the Snowman or Christmas With The Kranks, but I'll be darned if there wasn't a Christmas special on every single night From December 1st to the 23rd. When I was a kid all we got was Charlie Brown, Frosty and The Grinch (the good one, not the one with Jim Carrey...that one was just stupid) and the Santa driving away on the Norelco electric razor. Honestly, that was genius advertising. It made me, an 8 year old girl, put a Norelco electric razor on my Christmas list. My parents must have been worried...
Anyway...so my cell phone rang and I saw it was my mother so I answered, "Hi Mom! What's up?" There was a long-ish pause and then some accented male voice asks, "Do you know (insert my parents full names here)?" Immediately I think that they are being held captive by some crazy, high drug dealers. You may laugh, but you do not know what kind of trouble my stupid sister has been in....
On with the saga; I asked the drug dealer who he was and what he wanted. The voice said (and I shit you not...this was the exact wording) "I'm a policeman. Your mother choked and she was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Your father is here alone; how soon can you get here?" Okay. Let's break this down...
1) My mother choked. She might be dead.
2) My father is alone. He doesn't know who anyone is anymore. The last time he was alone for a brief moment, he went out in 3 feet of snow in a robe and slippers looking for his mother.
3) Wait! My father is NOT alone. He is with some strange policeman in my parents house. The policeman has a gun.
4) I have no proof that the disembodied voice on the other end of the phone is an actual policeman so....
5) Yep. I'm back to the "my parents are being held hostage by a drug dealer" scenario again.

I responded by doing what anyone in this situation would do. I started to cry. Immediately my kids were under the table (we were in a booth..they were on one side and I was on the other) and on either side of me saying, "It's okay, mama. It's going to be okay." God in Heaven, I love those kids. In any case, it still didn't change the fact that I was in a restaurant miles away from my parents house and my husband was on his way to HIS mothers house because she had a concussion! What to do?
I asked the "policeman" to tell me what had happened and he haltingly told me that my mother was choking and the neighbor called 911. I asked him where that neighbor was and he told me that he was right there with my dad so I asked if I could talk to him. Well, he put my mom's neighbor on the phone and I recognized the voice so I felt somewhat better. Turned out my mom was alive but had a blockage in her throat so the paramedics took her to the hospital. Blah, blah blah...and then the cop was back on the phone asking me my full name, address, date of birth, etc. I started getting suspicious again because my stupid sister had stolen my identity once and...well, long story. I decided to just tell the cop my name and tell him I would call him right back when I figured out what to do. At that point our pot-stickers came and I told the kids to go ahead and eat while I made a couple of phone calls. They were crying too now, but I said everything was okay even though I was totally freaking out.
In a nutshell, this is what happened. I called Tony and he said he would drop the food off to his mom (who lives minutes away from my parents house) and get his mom's neighbor to come and sit with her. He would then go to my parents house and get rid of the stinking copper. (He didn't say it like that, but it would have been funny if he did. Not at the time, mind you...but later when re-telling the story.) Then we would figure out what was up with my mom and stuff. Whew! Thank God for Tony. He may be a total slob, but he is a wonderful caring man who would do anything for family. I chose wisely. (The next day my dear friend P told me he would have gone to be with my dad too and so would his sister. He said to call him anytime my parents needed anything. I chose my friends wisely, too.)
In the meantime, I called the cop back and told him my husband was on his way. During this conversation, the rest of our food came. I hadn't eaten even a bite of a pot sticker because I was so upset and now I was looking at almond chicken I couldn't eat either because I still didn't know where my mother was and what state she was in. While I was talking to the fuzz, my call waiting beeped. I clicked over and it was my mom! Yippee! she was fine, but she was at the hospital with no coat, no shoes and no way home. Plus she was at a hospital another 20 minutes past their house from where I was. Okay...what to do, what to do? I told her to call me back in 5 minutes because I needed to call Tony and see what to do. I knew Tony couldn't go get my mom because then he would have to take my dad and Tony drives a 2 seat Honda Del Sol, AKA, the Albatross. So, I called Tony and he said he was with my dad and the cop was still there and everything was fine. Hang on!! Call waiting!!! It was my mom who told me that her nurse said she would warm up some blankets and wrap my mom up and drive her home herself. So I clicked back to Tony and said that my mom would be home with the nurse within an hour. When I hung up, the food was all boxed up and I had spent no "girl time" with my kids. The waiter put the bill down with 3 fortune cookies on top of it. I gamely smiled and said, "Okay girls! Let's see what our fortunes are! If you don't mind, I am going to pick my cookie first because I haven't eaten anything yet." The girls smiled and nodded and asked if everything was okay with Gramma and Grampa. I told them that it was all worked out and not to worry...I just wanted to have them open their fortune cookies and try to salvage some fun out of this shitty night. So, we all opened our cookies and proceeded to pull out the paper fortunes. Except that my fucking cookie was empty!!! Seriously. I looked up and the girls looked at me like, "Is she going to cry again? What do we do?!!?!? We are children!"
Well, I just laughed. I laughed and laughed and the girls laughed and laughed. Bronte wanted to get me a different cookie but I really thought that one was perfect. Brenna started to make up fortunes for me, like..."Confucius say...you get no fortune!" and "Confucius say...empty cookie better than cookie with bug!"
It was a bad day...but it's over now!