Tag Archives: humor

Killing me softly with yogurt

As a rule, I avoid the ladies (and occasional gentlemen) who hand out samples in the grocery store. My wife likes to see what they have to offer, but I don’t even like to make eye contact with them.

One summer during college, I worked in a grocery store, often behind the bottle return counter. This was before anyone invented machines to take back all those gross, sticky bottles. Instead, they got handed to me. I had to touch every one of them in order to sort them into the proper bins. With that kind of baggage, is it any wonder that I find the idea of eating anything in the grocery store abhorrent?

The days of my youthful exuberance, before working the bottle return counter made me cold and cynical . . . and bald. (My neck is no longer bent under the weight of that hair.)

So, no, I don’t want to try a sample. It’s probably some unholy combination anyway; hence the need to force it upon unwitting passersby. Even if it could defy the odds and appear somewhat appetizing, I have my grocery store demons to keep my teeth clenched together.

I was appalled, therefore, shopping with my son, to find a sample lady beaming at us expectantly from the end of our aisle. This meant I would have to sacrifice another little piece of my soul in declining the generous offer of a kindly stranger.

Worse was the betrayal I felt at realizing that my boy was pulling me toward the trap, eager to see what treats this woman was offering out of her gingerbread house. I hate it when he acts like his mother’s boy and his mother is nowhere near to deal with the consequences.

Overcome with a rare spell of patience, I concluded that it was not right to make the boy carry the burden of my supermarket baggage. I allowed him to lead me to the sample cart, where his instincts were proven to be uncanny. The lady was doling out cups filled with flavored yogurt made especially for kids.

Through what witchcraft this lady wordlessly reeled him to her, I cannot say. I let him taste a sample, but I stayed very near his side. As sweet and gentle as she appeared, she was still a grocery store sample lady.

My son ate the entire sample. He said he liked it. I was skeptical. This boy eating yogurt? It didn’t seem right. I asked him if he were sure he liked it. He nodded. He really liked it. We should buy some for home.

A scientific breakthrough of enormous potential: flavored yogurt developed especially to appeal to kids.

I asked the proud lady where this magical, child-friendly yogurt was to be found. She pointed toward the opposite corner of the store. Excellent. This would give me a chance to remove the boy from her sphere of influence and question him privately about the yogurt. When the truth came out, we could exit the store yogurt-free, and without Yogurt-Mesmer knowing our deception.

She read my duplicitous soul through my eyes. A knowing smile lit her face. “I happen to have one more four-pack right here,” she said, materializing the item from the amorphous folds of her robe. (Robe, apron, what’s the difference?) My son’s eyes grew bright. Mine darkened. Defeated, I took the package and put it into our cart.

Later that day, when my son asked for a snack, I opened one of his cups of yogurt for him. He took the first spoonful willingly enough, but made an unhappy face at tasting it. The second spoonful took more effort. It was the last. “This stuff is disgusting!” the boy declared. He’s never taken another bite of the concoction. He runs away whenever I mention opening another cup of it for him.

Wasted potential: flavored yogurt developed especially to appeal to kids, meet garbage disposal, developed especially to erase evidence of Daddy’s gullibility.

That’s how modern witchcraft works, my friends. No longer does it lure children into candy houses where they are fattened up as dinner entrees. Now it lures them to the sample cart, where Daddy’s money is sucked down the rabbit hole of the retail machine. It’s good to see that even fairy tales are keeping up with the times.

Where are your boob holes when you need them?

If you are like me, you probably think that all hospital gowns are pretty much the same. That just goes to show how wrong it is to be like me. You should try very hard not to do it anymore.

In the maternity ward, they have a special gown, just for mom, with holes cut out over the breasts. I don’t remember seeing these on our first visit to the maternity ward, in 2008, but I suspect I just didn’t notice. After all, I was passed out much of the time, and overwhelmed by the prospect of a lifetime of parenthood when conscious.

The ostensible purpose of these special gowns is to allow mothers to breastfeed their babies without having to navigate all the way around to the open edge of the gown. While this is a noble cause, and a team of engineers probably dedicated the better part of their careers to calculating the optimal number of holes, I think it must be the most underutilized piece of medical technology in existence.

I almost missed knowing about these medical advancements on this last visit too, and with good reason. Though my wife breastfed from the get-go, she most often did so by throwing the bulk of her gown up over her shoulder with the same abandon with which a cavalier would manage his cape.

Only once, entangled in the gown, bed sheets, and other sundry cloaks of fresh motherhood, did my wife attempt to use these helpful slits in her apparel. She wriggled around, searching the folds of her peculiar garment. “Where are your boob holes when you need them?” she muttered in frustration.

This was my first indication that such a thing existed. “What are boob holes?” I asked, a little embarrassed that, in my position as a repeat father, I might have been ignorant of an entire undiscovered acre of female anatomy.

She pointed to a spare gown hanging on the bathroom door. Unlike the gown she wore, this one clearly showed a hole, by virtue of its being hung from it. Before I could note the difference between this hole and the short sleeves at either side, I said, “I thought that was an arm hole.”

This gown must be defective. Who has arms this close together?

“How many arms do you think I have?” she asked. Clearly, her frustration with her own gown was making her sarcastic.

Intrigued, I took down the extra gown and examined it. True enough, there were two spare arm holes cut right smack into the front of it. “Science!” I whistled to myself. I was just at the point of thinking that we might be able to use one of these at home, when a couple of quick impulses cooled my ardor.

First, my wife had given up and slung the bulk of her gown off to the side. She had finally located one of the holes, but it was awkwardly situated and she had no success using it to lasso anything useful to a baby. I’m no expert on hospital gowns, but it seems to me that they are difficult to keep on straight.

Some sicko with a camera playing dress-up in hospital dainties. They really ought to be more careful about who they let into the maternity ward.

By the time a woman gets into bed and maneuvers breast and baby onto a collision course, the boob holes (pardon my continued use of technical terms) might as well be arm holes. A baby stands a better chance of finding milk by shoving his head up a sleeve.

Second, the material of the hospital gown seems flimsy and unattractive to me. I think I’ll wait until they start making these chic little outfits in leather.

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Dispatches from the Delivery Room, Part 2: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Labor Pain

Watching your wife go through labor is kind of like seeing the one you love turn into a werewolf. There is nothing you can do to stop the transformation; your wife possesses decreasing cognition of why she shouldn’t tear you apart; and the townspeople agree that you are not to be trusted to make the difficult decisions that might need to be made.

When my wife’s contractions were getting to be about five minutes apart, she could still speak to me as a friend. She very calmly made the arrangements for our three-year-old to be looked after. She put the house in order, and even accepted my comforting touch whenever her five minutes of peace expired. We got into the car and drove to hospital like married people.

Even though the contractions were only five minutes apart, the hospital wasn’t satisfied that she had made enough progress to be admitted. They made us walk the halls for an hour, after which they became convinced that we had no business there. They sent us home; we were welcome to come back when we were serious about having a baby.

A lot can go wrong when one finds himself alone in a car with a woman in labor. Even though we were heading home, I drove as though it were an emergency. I was sure that I would be pulled over for speeding at any moment. I imagined how I would explain myself to the cop. “My wife is in labor, Officer. So, naturally, we are driving away from the hospital as fast as we can.”

Back home, my wife’s contractions gained in intensity. There was no more quiet conversation in between. To make matters more frightfully confusing, those damned pains would not pace themselves at regular intervals like they do in all the training literature.

We tried every position, short of standing her on her head, to alleviate her agony. A warm bath helped for a few minutes, but soon became just another terror associated with the pain. All the while we debated the wisdom of returning to the hospital. What if all of our screaming and writhing were still not worthy of their hospitality? What if they sent us home a second time? That wouldn’t make us feel like social outcasts.

After three or four hours of this, my wife crossed an invisible line. I could no longer reach her. She had gone into werelabor. The transformation was manifest in her incongruous plea, “Help me! Help me! DON’T TOUCH ME!”

Her sister helped me load her into the car, for she was beyond the management of a single human. At the second stoplight, the cruel spirits of labor overcame her. “I can’t stand this!” she moaned. “I gotta get out of here!” Only my quick finger on the auto door lock kept her from laboring against traffic in a busy intersection and causing chaos in the streets.

Our son was nearly born in the middle of this intersection. Despite his mother’s fervent attempt to have it all out here, I stuck to my guns and insisted upon a hospital birth.

In the hospital again, the doctor did another cervix exam. She announced to us that it was four centimeters dilated, which was enough progress for us to earn a bed at their inn. I’m not sure if it were four centimeters or not. I truly believe that, having seen the wild light in my wife’s eyes, the doctor knew what answer she had better give before she pulled on her gloves.

Finally invited to give birth among polite society, my wife howled for pain medication.  The hospital staff insisted on observing certain formalities first. This only left my wife more desperate. I soon found myself caught between calculating civilization and the primal needs of raw nature, trying to forge a peace between two powers with which I held waning influence.

This was when I understood that they were both right. Raw nature had no good reason not to tear me apart. I was merely an annoying noise that brought relief no closer. At the same time, civilization could not trust me to make calculated decisions. The werewolf was too much a part of my heart.

In all fairness, my wife only turned werewolf under the most stressful conditions imaginable. I often turn into a Frankenstein while sitting around the house, without provocation. (Photo credit: my three-year-old son with his Fisher-Price camera.)

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Dispatches from the Delivery Room, Part 1: It’s a Madhouse!

I’ve heard it said that there is a special provision of nature that allows a mother to forget the pain of childbirth. Without this special indulgence, it might be hard to imagine any family containing more than a single child. I have my own name for this natural phenomenon. I call it insanity.

Unfortunately, there is no magic wand to wipe a father’s memory clean. He is doomed to remember all of the many horrible hours in which a mother’s pain turned his wife into a stark raving lunatic. The height of her mental derangement comes in an otherwise very calm statement, when in a moment of seemingly stable reflection, the mother makes this declaration: “It wasn’t nearly this bad last time.”

The mother makes this laughable comparison as if to imply that at a similar point in her last labor, she was entertaining well-wishers with tea and scones. It was a nice little get-together in the delivery room, at the end of which a beautiful baby was delivered in a holiday basket garnished with fresh flowers and an assortment of candied fruit.

In 2008, this baby eased into the world as smoothly as strawberries and cream - according to contemporary lore.

Only the father recalls the piercing screams and tortured howls of the former occasion. Yet a sense of self-preservation makes him humor the mother’s madness. Only a fool would argue with bedlam.

The mother, in her delirium, feels betrayed by fate. How could such a pleasant occasion have been turned into such a nightmare on her? Surely, this injustice cannot last long. It’s not supposed to hurt like this. God knows, it never did before.

I’m not sure what God knows, but the father knows it hurt exactly like this before. He knows there is nothing he can do about it, and he knows that he will be scolded severely for whatever he does to help and whatever he doesn’t do to help. The contract has been signed, and the contract doesn’t mention scones or gift baskets. There’s no turning back now.

There are still hours and hours to go. The mother is in pain like (to the best of her recollection) she’s never felt before. Also, she’s mightily pissed off because somebody has changed the whole process on her since last time. No one is feeding her bonbons . . . in the shade . . . beside a babbling brook . . . to while away the carefree hours of labor like they did last time. Insult to injury, that’s what that is.

In 2012, this child's birth caused much gnashing of teeth. A mother's love will soon rewrite history to show that it was all sunshine and lollipops.

The father sighs. There are still hours to go. And the only little task he needs to accomplish in all that time is to soothe the physical and emotional pains of a hurting, pissed off, delirious woman who suspects that he is the main conspirator in the cruel joke that is being played upon her.

He will remember this instance too, long after it has been whitewashed with rose pedals.