Things You Can Count On: After The Merry (2)

(continued, from below. yo.)

E) I Love You, I Do: NOW, GO

1) You will pre-stack all the winter clothes and the lunches into tiny mountains for your zombieesque/first-day-back-at-school kids.

2) You will be extra gentle to your sleepy children on that first very dark and cold morning back and try to woo them to life with waffles and extra syrup.

3) You will answer these questions of your husband twice: where's my phone? where's my wallet?

4) You will very calmly and with pudding-like pressure sweetly remind them (all) (at last) of the tick-tick-tocking time.

5) Gotta go guys, you will nearly whisper, all smiley. All calm. Ya gotta go...

6) Guys? Guys? Hey guys!!!

7) Oh fer chrissake.

8) You will slump into the couch with your watery coffee in your suddenly silent house but for the rumble of the dishwasher and the ice falling down into the freezer and you will sigh and look around and wonder: what to do?

F) Oh Allen Wrench, My Allen Wrench

1) You will have giant boxes not because you are packing, but because you are staying put.

2) Which is a very happy thing and also a kind of sad thing. Settling and totally unsettling: as in -- what now? This? More this?

3) In giant boxes come BRAND NEW CHAIRS, chairs you must build yourself but no matter: they are the newness that might make your old place seem... newer? Fresher, that's it.

4) In your haste to recreate your life, reinvest in it, in the same zip code, you will toss the directions and soon regret it.

5) You will step back from your incredibly dumb mistake, swear like a mothertrucker and then trip over the new rug (more newness!) and land smack on your ass, crammed between the giant box and the wall in a very, very unattractive way.

6) You will look around to see if anyone saw, which is ridiculous...

7) You are alone always now in the middle of the day!

8) But there you are, saying "oh effing a" (just like that) and "that really hurt" -- out loud -- to no one.

9) Your thumb and forefinger will bear the purple callused bruises of your tightening, you expert carpentry.

7) You will wonder if you love or hate Allen, he of the wrench fame.

G) They Say It's Your Birthday -- And THEY WON'T STOP SAYING IT

1) January will come to you with inevitable ice and gray and the anti-climactic end of an aggressively happy time and also, your birthday.

2) Your children will find this intensely exciting and hysterical.

3) Why?

4) Maybe, like you, they are noticing the bittersweet passage of time and knowing that soon you will leap into the category where most of the world will see you as "old" or maybe they are just counting on cake and a goody bag.

5) You're pretty sure that's what it is: the cake, the goodies.

6) Meanwhile, your sisters will pitch in on the hysteria: "i can't believe it" they will squeal and your mother will find it all so very shocking and "kind of a miracle" since she is only 50 after all.

7) Truth is, you've been waiting for this day. When you were 29, you told your father you couldn't wait for 40, because you knew that by then you would have gotten it all worked out -- where you would live, how you would live -- and you would be able to look at yourself in the mirror and and know where you were going and...

8) Yeah, you could be deep at 29. And also kind of naive. Maybe.

9) Maybe not.

H) The Goat, She Climbs

1) You will hold the camera up to the mirror and try to see yourself as you are.

2) You will change the "mode" like sixteen times because holy good god: it can't be that bad. Is there a vaseline-on-the-lens mode? You should invent that.

3) You will snap pictures of your face (of you? of you!) on your birthday because once when you were young you said you would be good with that and you can't let that dumb younger you down.

4) Maybe when you were 29 you meant the whole looking-in-the-mirror thing metaphorically? 'Cause: ugh.

5) Fuck it. Click. Click. Click, like a machine gun of confidence, you'll fire. (It will become less self-indulgent than it seems after a while. It will seem like therapy in a way. Like meditation on some theme you forgot.)

6) You will let the pictures sit in the camera.

7) You will instead re-read a manuscript you didn't write but love as if you did and then you will do the harder work of adding one more paragraph to your own.

8) Before the day collides with everyone else's day, you will plug the little camera into the machine and hit "import all."

7) Then you will vacuum, because you're hosting a PTO meeting tonight -- the New Year has begun; let's go! -- and it's a good idea to get ahead of the stampede of Short Drunk People and all the mom mom mom's they'll bring home with them.

8 ) Download done, you'll step back to see, you will literally step back -- there's the big nose, the freckles, the imperfections, some shyness and well, nothing new.

9) Here you are on your 40th birthday as you saw you on this day...

10) You will be okay with it -- that face, this life -- like you said you would be.

11) But despite the fact that your husband's work will keep you (let you?) stay here in this Small Town, you will have no idea where you are going.

10) You will have no idea at all. How awesome is that? Happy Birthday to you, you old hag.