It began when she tried introducing our new kitten, and chose to do it by shoving him out with straight arms and just blurting,
“This is Seuss. We’re going to be letting him go outside soon.”
Maggie just blinked at the dangling kitten and didn’t quite know what to do.
It continued through times of asking to borrow baking ingredients, when she’d return with the completely wrong thing;
But somewhere along the line, it had become a “thing” for my 14 year old, Chloe.
She had carved herself into an awkward history with our neighbor Maggie, and she did not know how it could be undone.
“I don’t know what it is,” she had told me just last week.
“It’s like I see her and just cannot be normal.”
I had argued that it wasn’t an actual thing,
and she was making more of it than she should.
Maggie and Dave are quiet people.
Kind of hippies. They don’t own a TV.
We often pass Dave standing on hill at the park way off in the distance doing Tai Chi in the fog.
They are the kind that don’t produce waste.
They compost and recycle it all.
We once tried sneaking one of our trash bags in their bin after Christmas, as the lid on ours would not even close,
and when we lifted the lid to see if theirs had room for our bag by any chance,
all we found in it for a week’s worth of garbage was an old bath mat.
They are the types that are extremely environmentally and dietarily conscious.
The types we hide our Taco Bell from.
If we arrive home from the drive through, and they are out in their yard, we holler “Go, go, go!” as we smuggle our shame into the house.
I tell you this so it will make sense when I tell the story that is about to come.
On Saturday I laid out a pork loin to thaw,
planning to use it for dinner that night.
As it lay in the sink, I enlisted the girls to help me clean out our refrigerator.
We all worked hard, each one with a separate job, and I praised them for their work in the end, but later as I drove Chloe with me to the store for the two remaining things I needed for my recipe, I watched as her expression revealed she had just recognized what was that was on my meal plan.
“Oh no…Were you planning to use that frozen meat in the sink to make dinner tonight?”
“Yes,” I answered, and “Why do you ask?”
Her face was all I needed to realize.
“Did you guys throw out the pork loin as we were cleaning the fridge?!”
“Paige told me everything around the sink was trash, so I stuffed it down into the bag.”
Determined to not let that perfectly good, and still vacuum sealed pork loin just go to waste,
I explained to her that we weren’t going to leave it to rot, and we would dig it out of the garbage right after we shopped.
So there we were, freshly returned from the store, standing bent over our garbage bin.
Both of our arms in tossed out food up to our elbows, feeling around for the pork loin.
It took quite awhile, but suddenly I felt it, and as I unearthed it, like baby Simba, I held it up.
Bits of lettuce and old rice fell from it’s package onto me. I didn’t care. We’d located the meat.
Dinner was saved.
Chloe had just taken it from my hands, loudly saying she would just take it inside and rinse it off, and get it started cooking it up, when
WE TURNED TO SEE MAGGIE STANDING DIRECTLY BEHIND US
Watching, confused, and weakly waving at us.
And that is when Chloe, who had earlier this week expressed the frequent desire for oxygen masks to just fall from the sky,
clutched that garbage roast like a football, our trash meat that, unlike our Taco Bell, we could not hide,
turned around to me and mouthed in mortification,
“See. I TOLD YOU. It just happened again.”
This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
