Looking back with Lot's Wife

I thought I would be different! YOU NEED TO BUY THE MALIBU BARBIE SHOWER AND CLUB HOUSE or your little girl will never get in touch with her inner babe, never date, become a dried up scaley old lady with a mustache. (And haven’t we all been there?) I’m in California visiting grandkids—my 18 month old granddaughter in LA and my ten-year-old grandson in Solvang, and I’m finding that nothing has changed for me as a grandparent—I’m the same awful loser I was as a mom. Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you’re in Toys ‘R Us or Walmart, whatever, with the kids, and suddenly you’re overwhelmed by the marketing! You freeze up! You can’t make decisions anymore! What will your kids be like without this stuff!! If the boy doesn’t have the NEWEST PLAY STATION he won’t be aggressive enough, the other boys will stomp him, man, he’ll never get an NBA contract or be a sports lawyer. It gets to look more important than college that they learn how to say “Yo, wha’s up?” I’m a nerd again. I flash ...

Surprised Mom Recounts Experience My fourteen-year-old son, Kenneth, announced one Sunday morning that he was no longer interested in going to church with us. He would be staying home watching the Broncos on TV from now on. “Great. See ya in a couple of hours,” I said as his sister, Maura, and I walked out the door. Ken, now in his thirties, remembers that as a turning point in his life. In a moment of lunacy, I asked my four (two grown, two teen) children what they thought was good, if anything, about the way they’ve been raised. Long a devoted buyer of science sets and encyclopedias, I thought they would perhaps mention the wonderfully rich intellectual climate I provided—although they basically all did their homework while watching TV and used the science sets in definitely unscientific ways. Maybe they’d be grateful for the health food binges we went on, thereby insuring that for all time they would know which is the tabouli and which is the couscous at a salad bar. As I remembered...

The Rules I have three theories of life: 1) Things are always at their worst right before they work out 2) Things that make you sick with dread always turn out to be better than you thought (and conversely, things that you thought were going to be perfect are always horrible) 3) Things always work out for the best My husband doesn’t subscribe to any of these theories. He doesn’t think things ALWAYS work out and he thinks that if something looks terrible, it usually is. So we have a problem and as usual, the problem is that I’m right and he’s wrong. And I can prove it. Take Sunday morning, for example. I have the best/worst job in the church, Primary chorister. There are some problems with me being chorister, not that least of which is that I can’t sing. But the worst part is the doggone visual aids. I just can’t do them. Now the problem with church jobs is that you have to do them mostly in front of everybody else in the ward—which around here usually means your neighborhood. No comfor...

June 5, 1995 A Visit To France France. I am in France and I'm having this incredible Disney experience. I know this can't be real because so much of my life is composed of simulated experiences which are meant to be almost real, that this has left me in a bizarre twilight world in which I expect my guide to show up and direct me to the exit when my time is up. My mind speaks French and English and I can no longer speak comfortably in either language. Someone has very cleverly taken all the signs here and translated them into Franglais. Everything is the same but nothing matches. The "ordinateur" on which I'm typing has some of the letters in the wrong places, upside down. Much of my college French is intact, but I, who never have trouble speaking, have nothing to say with those words. I am traveling with the kids from my kids' school. As we left the U. S. I realized that my children didn't want to be with me, except occasionally for comfort. Did I w...

Frankly my relationship with the warning light on my dashboard is on a “need to know” basis—and I don’t see anything there that I would ever want or need to know. So last week, when my dashboard said “service engine soon,” I assumed, as any normal person would, that it meant, “You know, if you get around to it, it would be good, actually it’s nothing very serious, but it would be good if you could get your husband to run the car over to a gas station, or maybe just have a look himself, but really, only if you guys have time. Really, it’s nothing serious.” THAT’S what I would mean if I were a dashboard light. There SHOULD be light that says, “This is an absolute emergency and if you don’t do something right now, and I mean NOW, there are going to be dire consequences.” Unfortunately, that light has been removed from our car. So, really, until the loud clunking noise began, I wasn’t taking this too seriously. AS it turned out, I made a grave mistake. We needed a new engine. My husband ah...

First, a joke: These three guys go to heaven and when they get there, St. Peter asks them each to tell him a little about himself. So, the first guy says, “Well, St. Peter, when I was on earth I had an I.Q. of 165 and I was a rocket scientist” “Well,” says St. Peter, “this is wonderful news. We hardly ever get any scientists up here! Come on in!” And the guy went into heaven. The next guy comes up and says, “St. Peter, on earth I was a famous author and my I.Q. was 145. Can I come in?” St. Peter says of course, he would be delighted to have such a distinguished soul up in heaven. Next comes the poor third guy. He says, “St, Peter, on earth my I.Q. was only 38.” He was obviously heartbroken. St. Peter pondered for awhile and then he brightened up. “Did you get your deer?” My father’s birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and in anticipating that, I’d like to list some of the very best information that he left to his children while we were growing up: “NEVER feel sorry for yourself. No m...

Viva Las Vegas? #1 January 8, 1992 Well, I’ve lost my virginity—after two husbands and five kids. I’ve been to see the fat lady as they used to say at the old time carnivals. In fact, there were about a million fat ladies. We’ve been to Las Vegas for the first time. Impossible as it may seem, we’ve gotten to be this old and this experienced without ever partaking of this sublime experience. I hope it never comes back. We went to Las Vegas expecting to see SIN in all its many guises. I expected to be beguiled by evils, so to speak. At the very least, I expected drunks in the streets and a carnival atmosphere. No one prepared me for hoards of seriously intent quarter pushers, people with the deep expressions of chairmen of the board facing hostile takeovers. No one laughs while gambling. It’s do or die, guns along the Mohawk with these people. I didn’t except everybody to be middle aged. The women in matching hot pink sweatsuits with bejeweled and sequined tops, the men in logo-bedecked ...