Looking back with Lot's Wife

August 23, 2000 I feel as nervous as when I was a new mom trying to figure out which end of the baby to diaper. This is my first babysitting job as a new grandma. There is so much to learn and as Ginger Rogers said – she had to do everything Fred Astaire did and do it backwards. That’s what the role of grandma is. You need to do what the parents want you to do – especially if you were a parent like me whose children barely came out of it alive and actually deserve some sort of survival medal. My daughter-in-law is a lot better parent than me. Back in the old days, I was the parent of that three-year-old running around the concessions stand at the Art City Drive-In at 11 at night in a messy diaper. Still sucking on a binky. Still not potty-trained. I barely got my kids trained for kindergarten—I still thank heaven for those half days. I had thumb suckers and tantrum throwers. We ate candy—they got that first sweet taste of Snickers along with mother’s milk. They ate whole corn and fish ...

August 2, 2000 I received a formal invitation to watch my seven-month-old granddaughter take a first swim. My daughter-in-law knows that I will be as thrilled to do this as if I had been invited to Buckingham Palace for high tea. Visiting from California, she must dole out each precious moment between two Springville grandmas, and this special treat happens to be at the other grandma’s house. I race to finish my morning work so that, if necessary, I will have hours to watch this magical creature perform impossible feats. I don’t take my camera because I don’t want to take pictures now, my first time watching. I’m afraid to spoil this moment. I want to enjoy every second this first time. When I arrive, our princess is decked out in a stretchy pink bathing suit that makes her chubby body look like a “love sausage.” My hand itch to hold her and I’m allowed to carry her outside to the waiting plastic pool filled with warmed water. We all stand around watching, all our attention glued to ba...

If I hadn’t talked to other people, if I didn’t know that we weren’t unusual, or, heaven forbid, bad parents, I wouldn’t be writing this. I would go to my grace in silence. Respectful silence. However, I must say that the first couple of days of the first “yours, mine and ours,” family-wide Elder Reunion were a night-mare. I uttered those immortal words, the motto of every over-indulgent, hysterical, “we will all be happy because I said so, crazed mom since the beginning of time.” I WILL NEVER DO THIS AGAIN IF I LIVE TO BE A MILLION YEARS OLD! I had planned it all out. We were going to a dude ranch in Southern Utah with all eight of our kids for a four-day holiday that would last from Thursday through Sunday. Everyone seemed excited. A couple of the kids couldn’t come, but most would be there bright and ready to go Thursday at noon. We had to be on time because the ranch had a camp counselor to make plans with Horseback riding. Ten a.m. Friday morning, line dancing. Five-thirty Saturda...

July 19, 2000 Hellos and good-byes are very dramatic moments for me. All my emotions surge to the front and I’m sometimes just overwhelmed. Of course, this doesn’t count in the grocery store and I can pretty much buy gas and see people in the laundromat—our dryer is broken—and leave and not choke up. But when I say good-bye at the end of a good conversation with a friend, I feel a wonderful synthesis where all the parts of our friendship come together and we put a seal on it and make a commitment to remember this moment and remember what happens when we’re together. It’s a bit much but it’s okay. A good conversation is like this wonderful work of art that you make with someone and your good-bye is its only obituary, its only marker. A good conversation makes me feel I understand the world a little better, that I’ve corrected somewhere where I was going wrong and learned a little more about love. Talking freely about life and feeling an atmosphere where that can happen is my favorite e...

July 12, 2000 My mother was a hypochondriac and while there are some sad and awful things about someone being a hypochondriac, I loved it. The best part was staying home from school—staying home was nice. On a snowy day, after looking out the kitchen window for a while, I would open the oven door and prop my feet up, watching the flames lick the gas grill while I fell asleep. Staying home sick from school meant grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and tomato soup. My mom simply didn’t believe in the modern world. So, among our luxuries, we didn’t have a toaster. We toasted our bread in the oven so it was hard and then we had cold butter chunks on it because, she said, “I don’t like rancid butter.” I thought that was swell—the burst of flavor when you hit a cold chunk of butter. My “Mama,” as we sometimes called her, believed that when you felt bad, you stayed home and you were sick and being sick was a pleasure and an honor. You were sanctified when you got sick. Illness was a special s...

June 28, 2000 As you get older, you can divide the kids into two groups, those who live near and those who don’t. And the unfortunate truth is that when the Far Aways come home for vacation, it’s a bigger deal than when the Already Heres come for Sunday supper. Also, the arrival of “guests” no matter how closely related, is a good excuse to get my husband moving and get some things done around here before I kill someone. This time I’ve gone a little overboard. I’ve replaced the carpet, redone the bathroom, re-landscaped the front yard, hired a carpet cleaner, gotten the windows cleaned, contemplated building a new deck, yelled at everybody—often, been to the grocery store four times and the nice bread store twice. And a big part of this hysteria is the momentum of it all. The single biggest difference between men and women is what they can stand to live with. Men’s entire worldview of the planet revolves around the idea of comfort. If an object feels good, if it’s been in the same plac...

June 7, 2000 Let me tell you about one of my favorite games. We played it this weekend at the benefit garden show for the hospital. It’s called, “What Other Husbands Do that You Don’t Do For Me.” You can play versions of this at furniture stores (“Why Don’t You Buy Me New Living Room Furniture?”) or bookstores (“Why Are You So Dumb?”) or romantic movies (“Why Don’t You Say Great Things Like That?”) The version we played this weekend is called “Why Doesn’t Our Back Yard Look Like This?” The game consists of making my husband feel as bad as possible without actually getting mad enough to reach over, open the car door and push me out onto the highway. First I had to set up the game, mainly getting him to go somewhere where they don’t serve salted foods, and convincing him it wasn’t unmanly to use a map to find places aptly described in the brochure as “hidden” gardens. But finally we got to our first patch—a place that can hardly be described as someone’s back yard. Let me say, in general...