Christina Crawford Doesn't Live Here

     The Gummer and I got into an argument today. It escalated to the point that I used the two words which indicate that things have gone too far: Christina Crawford.  I stormed out. She stormed out. Fifteen minutes later, we ran into each other at the grocery store. That's how love is.
     One of the reasons that she and I argue so much is that we are simply not compatible personality types. I get mad that she isn't more like me, and she gets jealous that she can't be more like me. (Okay, no. She gets mad that I am not more like her.) Another reason that she and I argue so much is that she cannot follow the basic rules of debate. She just kind of hi-YAs all over the place, and I end up losing debates that should totally have been in my pocket. It is very much like dealing with a toddler who has missed naptime or a special ed student who has gone off the rails. I keep saying that I should I get a bracelet with "DNE" engraved in it: "Do Not Engage". As the saying goes "I do not have to attend every argument I'm invited to".  As my track record shows, I do not know when to throw in the towel.
     So, fifteen minutes after we made our dramatic "Exit Stage Left"s, she was pulling a shopping cart out of the corral (or whatever the hell it is) at our local Schnuck's supermarket while I was shouting, "I know YOU!" She replied, "I do not know you." False, Gummitor! I just cashed in the lottery ticket my son got you to buy me for Mother's Day. I've got $2 that says our Kevin Bacon has a common biscuit. (What?)
    Anyway, so the Schnuck's thing was cute. I also keep reminding myself that, after 40 years, I am familiar with the product. I am the dumbass who gets in the ring with Ginsu Gummitor despite a clearly established list of warning signs and hot topics. (Not Hot Pockets. Hot Pockets are yummy. (But then, maybe they turn on you, too.)) "Why does this room smell like piss and vinegar? Oh, yes... let's discuss The Mythical Garage Sale That Has So Many Issues Attached To It." Yes, Billy Joel. I oughtta know by now. I oughtta do more cardio, too. Whatever.
   While I was waiting for The Boy to arrive via autobus (post-Schnuck's encounter), I decided to stop seething and focus on good things about The Gummer. Here are five memories that make me happy:

1. For Halloween in pre-school, she dressed me up like the Carol Burnett cleaning lady. (Yeah, there's the cleaning thing again. Ignore it.) I had a little bucket, a broom, and a hairnet. I like the idea of her being a young, goofy parent. I like the idea of her being more like me. (It's my blog, and I am saying that I'm young. Leave it alone.)

2. When I started college, she sent me anonymous notes to wish me good luck. They were on floral note paper, and she disguised her handwriting. She denied writing the notes until I told her I was writing about them tonight.

3. She attended the videotaped poetry reading in my Women's Studies class. (Disclaimer: It was not poetry that I had written. My poetry is AWESOME. This was some Vagina Monologue knockoff. It was like The Fauxgina Dialogues.) In the video, she is watching us read these goofy, womyny poems like it's the most enlightening arrangement of vowels and consonants and vaginas ever. She continues to make this "Oh, how interesting!" face as I float across the stage and say some hippy-dippy vaginal-babbling crap about orgasms. (Again, I didn't write the poetry.) What a good sport! Taking one for the vag.

4. (Backgroud info:  1. It is a 10 - 12 hour drive from Athens (where I used to live) to Collinsville. I almost always drove straight through. 2. I have ADHD. When I don't take Adderall, I say stuff. That's why I take the Adderall.)  Once after I arrived home from Athens, The Gummer was showing me what they had that I might want for a snack: bologna, leftover peas, something in a styrofoam container... She held up a bag of Poppycock, and I impulsively announced: "Cock!" The face she made was awesome. She was shocked and amused, but not upset at all. What a good sport! Taking one for the...

5. On the first night that I brought Jack to Collinsville, he slept in a playpen-type thing in my room. I woke up in the middle of the night and The Gummer was there, standing over the playpen like an apparition. She was just looking at Jack and smiling. There was a sweetness about her that... Well, I was not familiar with this version of her. Apparently, we had met before. She has said that she checked on us all night long when we were little. This Gummer is the one who dressed me up like Carol Burnett. Maybe it was easier for her when I was little, and now she's kind of like "Gummer, Interrupted".  Put those clothes back, Winona. There's nothing to hide.

 So there's that. Maybe I should save my money and forget about the "Do Not Engage" bracelet. I mean, she's family. How can I say no?

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TomatoGate: An Appendix

This is GAYB the God-Awful Yard Barn.

This is the toy box that my dad built. My parents wrote that "foxy" crap on there. My parents. Weird.

 This is me after gardening with my dad. I don't know why she had on hobo shoes. For street cred, maybe.



Happy Mother's Day to The Gummer...May she never read my blog.

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Part Five:She Ain't Joan Crawford, She's My Gummer

     She had felled the entire garden. She had then abandoned the scene of the crime.

   

     I flipped out. And I flipped. And flipped. And I kept right on flipping. I’m Irish and Scottish and German. It happens.

     I don’t remember the flipping part. It’s not like I DID anything. I was just pissed and ranting on the phone and being a little wrath monkey.

  

  The Gummer came home from visiting my brother. Her friend was with her. It was not a good time to discuss the family farm. Oh well. I started flippin' around in the front yard. The Gummer's friend made a hasty exit.

   

     The Gummer looked confused. No, she said, she had not committed tomatocide. 23 baby tomatoes and a kazillion blossoms, I reported. Flip, flip.

   “Oh, bullshit!” She left. She never wins by throwing the bullshit card. She never knows when to throw it.

     In retrospect, I think maybe she was trying to fuck with me, but she didn’t mean to fuck me over. She just meant to trim the tomatoes a little (and, though she would never admit it, to sort of keep me in check and exert her dominance in the Gummer Kingdom). She didn’t realize it had gotten out of control. It’s not like she can see through a black trash bag.

    Whatever. All this flipping was exhausting. It was too late for the damn tomatoes and too much of an investment to believe that I couldn’t trust her.  I pulled my garden out of the trash can and plucked 23 little tomatoes off of the vines. They looked like those little round balls of bait that remind me of rubbery balls of bread. I set twenty-three little, teeny-tiny tomato fetuses on the kitchen window sill as though just a little more time in the sun could undo the travesty which had been committed unto them.

    And then I laughed.

     Louis CK does a little stand-up bit about family and how to make it work. At the bottom line, he says, the secret to making it work is a simple philosophy: “Fuck it. Just…fuck it.”

    
So this brings us back to last month’s spring cleaning crusade:

  

      "Mom, you've been complaining about the basement and the yard barn for two years, You might want to let me focus on the basement and the yard barn. I'm really hungry and really crabby."

     "Ok, but help be lift that trash can first."

      “This is potting soil. Why are you throwing away soil?”

      “You aren’t going to be able to lift that”.

        I roll the trash can closer to the 7 x 2 + 1 sq. ft.  area that was my garden.  “I'm going to do it the same way I do everything: with “Fuck it. This is what I’m doing.”  I scoop little piles into The Garden That Was, carefully avoiding the few errant sprouts that have risen like foolish little phoenixes. The rain would level the soil out gradually, anyway. I went inside.

        I wasn't inside for long before I got that weird "Where's the baby?" feeling. I went back outside..

       The Gummer was in the “garden” with a shovel  levelling out my little soil piles. She looked like she had been caught in the cookie jar.  Interesting.

      “Mom, what are you doing?”

     
 Imbedded in the three words of her response was a dog whistle of an apology, a  nod of acknowledgement  of my endless effort to connect with her, a font of gratitude for that grandbaby, and all the affection that I see normal mothers expressing with, like, words and stuff.

     “Mom, what are you doing?”

    

      “Killing your garden.”

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Part Four

Okay, so back to TomatoGate:

Um, “Spring Cleaning” was the first part, then “TomatoGate: An Introduction”, then “Freerangin’, Freeballin; and Flopsy-Flurvy”.  So, this is, um, part four:

      When I last felt like writing about tomatoes, I was talking about my crazy ADHD garden in which I decided to grow everything only to find out I had been allotted the following farmscape:

   

     In this fifteen square foot Wonderland, I planted big tomatoes, little tomatoes, spring peas, pole beans, yellow squash, zucchini squash, carrots, spinach, mixed greens, cucumber, watermelon, strawberries, and, I think, a pumpkin. I figured I would maximize the vertical space.

  I planted whatever had sprouted and tried to...

     (Oh, and corn. I planted corn.)

         arrange things in sort of a high/ low sort of way and then I threw everything that hadn't sprouted in like Jackson Pollock's Optimistic Garden Filler.

        Everything was fine until it...wasn't. Plants were rising from the dead. Peas were coming up grody, and corn was coming up tougher than a kid from the Marcy Projects. Mixed greens were mixed in with everything else, and, you know, the pictures on those seed packets are illogically water-soluble. Like life in the Gummerdome, things were just too crowded.

      The little tomatoes, on the other hand, were nuts. ("Nuts" like crazy nuts, not like nutty nuts... I don't know. You're just going to have to work through that yourself.) Anyway, so the baby toms were thriving. (Yes, Katy Perry, it was a lycopene dream.) They were all vining up the fence, and every few days, I would go outside and weavy-windy the vines into the fence and pretend it was a vineyard.

     At that time, I was doing a little freelance special ed work. I had been asked to go out of town and provide respite care for about 24 hours, I knew The Gummer was going to her bad place. It's not OCD, per say. Not officially, anyway. She just gets really edgy before she has one of her Joan Crawford jags. It's like how some animals go apeshit before a storm. I could see it coming. I left.  

     When I pulled back into the driveway twenty-four hours later, my garden was gone.

    

    

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Ya Gotta Be Sweet, Pickle

"So there's this guy named Freud, and..."
___

       I'm turning forty in a few weeks. Yesterday, while The Gummer and I were discussing my life insurance policy and plans for Jack in the event of my untimely demise, she suddenly announced, "If I go into a nursing home, this house is going to be sold!"
      I stared at her. She was making Lemon-Sucking Only-Child Face again. How very productive.
      "Mom, don't go throwing shit onto the fire if it isn't going to burn."
      "That doesn't even make any sense!"
      "Of course, it doesn't." I paused and pictured her heaving a microwave onto a bonfire.
      "Okay, so my student loans would be forgiven. That's a plus..."

___

       "Is it raining yet? I need it to rain within the next thirty minutes."
       "You're the one who wanted him to play baseball." She makes a face like a pig backing away from a bad smell. I wonder if they teach that as a debate tactic in law school.
       "Were you 'Sunshine' in the arrangement?" My parents had called each other 'Sunshine' and 'Moonbeam'.
       "Yes."
       "How did you get to be 'Sunshine'?"
       "Because someone loved me." She glittered.
        I did not:
       "And I guess 'DoomCloud' would have made a weird pet name."

___

      "Mom, why is the sea salt grinder sitting out?"
      "It turns, but nothing comes out."
      "I don't know what it is that you find so vexing about that sea salt grinder."

      I go into the kitchen and investigate. There is nothing wrong with the grinder...if you take the lid off.  I go back into the living room.

      "I think it's my arthritis."
      "Look, Mom. You just hold this part and twist this part. It's like giving a really lame hand job. You know."

_____

      It can't all be snarky. You have to add a little sugar to the vinegar if you want to be sweet, pickle:

      Last night, I went to kiss my sleeping kid, and he said something about being at a party. His eyes flickered. I asked him who was there, and he sat up a little bit and answered me in whatever language he speaks in his dreams. I sat there for a while and talked to him about it even though he was asleep, his little eyes flickering with the work of it all. The Gummer came by, too, and, for a minute, we were all there at a little party in Jack's mind.

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Live Gummer Update

"Mom, why do people keep calling?"

      "Oh, I was trying to call the insurance company, and I called a porn number by mistake."

"Well, what did they say?"

      "It wasn't nice."

"What kind of porn isn't nice?"

 She just shakes her head, as I flip through the phone book.

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Freerangin', Freeballin', and Flopsy Flurvy

This is the second part of TomatoGate. Go back and read "TomatoGate: An Introduction" if you haven't read that part yet.
The Topsy Turvy Tomatapocolyspe

     Last year, I received a Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter as a gift from my sibling who lives in a Very Gated Community. The TTTP The T3P is, in my opinion, a piece of crap which is significantly crappier in person than it appears to be on television.  Not only is the planter itself flimsy, but you also have to find a place to hang the damn thing that’s strong enough to support a million pounds (plus or minus) of hypothetical tomatoes.

    The only place I had to hang the planter was the W.C. Fields lamp on the patio. If this thing produced like it does in the commercial, there was no way that lamp was going to be strong enough.  I decided to go with a more laidback “Flopsy Flurvy Tomato Lounger” approach. Translation: I was going to let the thing sit around on the patio until it figured out what it wanted to do with its life.

   I may have overestimated the tomato plant’s inherent desire to go forth and be fruitful.  I may have continued to believe long after all signs of life had subsided. (I’m that girlfriend, and thus, I do not date. It's too hard to give up the ghost.) It is quite likely that the residents of the Flopsy Flurvy Tomato Lounger (née Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter) left this world while I was busy trying to find a teaching position in a state which apparently just wants children to run around all free range because everyone knows that that is a reputable teaching method. When I finally got around to checking on my little lycopeney friends, they were gone.

Facebook Status, April 25, 2010 at 5:36 pm:

Throwing Out the Baby with Grandma: When categorizing items as “Trash” or “Not Trash”, The Gummer cannot distinguish between a dead tomato plant and a Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter filled with perfectly good potting soil.

“Mom, why did you throw it away?”

“The tomato plant was dead.”

“The PLANTER wasn’t dead.”

“I had it in a black trash bag in the garage for a week before I threw it away. You should have seen it.”

“I cannot see through a black plastic bag.”

TomatoGate had begun.

In This Part, I Talk About Balls For a While, But It's Really About Gardening

      Around that same time, I decided to plant a garden. In this garden, I would grow everything. (To quote Katt Williams: “Everything?” “Everything.”) I am absolutely not in any way exaggerating, in fact, I am probably leaving things out with this list. I planted: big tomatoes, little tomatoes, spring peas, pole beans, yellow squash, zucchini squash, carrots, spinach, mixed greens, cucumber, watermelon, strawberries, and, I think, a pumpkin.

    “That’s a lot,” you are probably thinking. You are right. “Well, yeah, but how big is your yard?” Good question. Thank you for that show of support. The yard is big, yes. “Well, do you have a PLOW?” Ah, no. The choice for me is plow free. The plow factor wouldn’t be an issue, anyway. I’ll get to that in a minute. I need to deal with all of these seeds first.

    I started the seeds in those little Pop Secret soil pucks and then transferred them to little Styrofoam cups. (Word is making me capitalize “Styrofoam”.  I thought we had a more casual relationship than that. Cardboard and I do not have a need for such formalities, Styrofoam. Get over yourself.) I kept the little unproductive pucks, because I am an optimist and I love the underdog. I combined fertile soil with futile soil like a deranged geneticist who was hell-bent on getting something to stick the landing. I transferred the seedlings to breeding trays which were sort-of divided by type until it rained, and my plant farm turned into Freeballin’ Plant Soup.  While that may not be an ideal gardening situation for some people, I generally prefer things to fall in more of a freeballin’ construct. (The Gummer is more of a “Balls in a Vice” kind of girl. If we are judged according to our (metaphorical) ball policies, I think most men would prefer my perspective even if is a little slapdash. Ooh, “slapdash” is not a good word for this. Um, loose, unstructured, free. I would say “chaotic”, but that reminds me of how I learned that “free” does not translate to “can be exchanged freely from right to left”. My sincere apologies, Innocent Victim of One of My Less Successful Experiments. I’m sure there were other things in the lab that buffered your trauma.)

    I digress…and I am talking about my mother and balls. Delete. Delete. Delete.

   Anyway, so I had all these seedlings and potential seedlings that needed to spread out. I asked The Gummer if I could have a little bit of yard to chew up and turn into farmscape. (How is “farmscape” not a word, Word? Add it.) There was a logical little plot next to GAYB (God-Awful Yard Barn). The Gummer begrudgingly said I could use the space between the patio and the fence. Yes, between. Two feet wide and seven feet long with one extra square foot sort of sticking out. I think the yard is a quarter-acre or maybe half an acre. Hell, maybe it’s an acre. I don’t know. It’s bigger than 15 square feet jammed between a 3 ft. high wall of concrete blocks and a fence. That is the sort of crap farmland that people give adopted children.

  So, I had all these plants or potential plants, and I was mad that she was limiting my potential. I, like Miley Cyrus, can’t be tamed. That is a problem when you live with someone who can’t stop micromanaging. The Gummer was getting more agitated with all the little Pop Secret carcasses and Styrofoam pods on the patio. But that wasn’t really the problem. The problem was that we were being reminded why I had moved out the minute I turned 18. Jack and I had been in Collinsville long enough for The Gummer to start waxing nostalgic about the glorious days when she had the entire house to herself. I was in a constant subterraneous state of freaked out, because it appeared that I had educated myself into unemployability.  I was unemployed but I wasn’t unpacked. Everything was stuck.

     Nobody likes a holding pattern. The Gummer and I were on the cusp of apeshit. What was brewing was an absolute, perfect storm of gung go, balls-to-the-wall, officially-diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder with A Scorching Side-Order of Hyperactivity versus bat shit, Joan Crawford, undiagnosed-but-oh-come-on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

     Hang on, little tomato. It's going to get ugly.

  

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