I Know Too Many People in this Town...

So, I woke up at noon since I got home from work at 4:30 in the blasted morning.  After consuming an ungodly amount of pizza and buffalo wings for breakfast, I decided grocery shopping was in order.  I typically drag Makayla on my shopping excursions for company but was in the mood to shop alone.  I left her with Matt Face and drove to United.  I was shopping for fruit and veggies for Makayla to ensure she develops good eating habits when my ex-boyfriend’s friend walked by.  She said, “Hi Jess!  How are you?” 

“I’m good, how about you?” I asked her, figuring she'd say "fine," and go away.  I was distracted by the outrageous price on produce and wondered if I would be OK with allowing welfare to buy my kiddos' fruits and veggies.  I decided that the welfare card thing wouldn't go with my wallet and dismissed the idea.

Anyway, she took my socially appropriate inquery of her wellbeing as her cue to start telling me about herself.  I was a little startled by this since her last words to me were “You’re an asshole!” after I kindly asked her to get off my boyfriend’s face.  I picked out peaches and cherries while she told me about her new boyfriend.  As I was picking out plums, I saw there were fruit flies having an orgy in them.  I started dry heaving and tried to conceal my face since I figured this was not the reaction she was looking for after telling me she had just finished grad school.  She doesn’t know me well enough to know I have the weakest stomach in the world.  Just a few days ago, I dry heaved violently after scraping crusty ketchup combined with honey mustard into the garbage disposal.  Makayla likes to mix the two together and dip her veggies into her “creation.”  Hours later, as I was telling Matt about it, I started dry heaving again and he said he didn’t need to know any more details since apparently, listening to me dry heave on the phone is annoying.  Vomiting is my initial reaction to any strong emotion: fear, worry, anger, extreme happiness.  When Caleb fell down the stairs when he was one, I vomited as I tried to retrieve him.  When I learned that my Uncle Shoni had passed away, I barfed as I hung up the phone.  When I learned I had won a 1,500 dollar scholarship on the ethics of trying to interfere with women’s circumcision in third world countries, I barfed.  I am aware that this is not normal behavior but there’s nothing I can do about it.  I’m assuming when Matt does propose to me, he will need to do so with an umbrella just to be safe.  Since I told him I want to be proposed to by a light house under the stars and next to the ocean while wearing a white skirt on a breezy night, I think I’ll have a fair warning.  Anyway, I recovered from my dry heaves and alerted an employee to the fruit fly situation.  I had just witnessed her pulling a cooler down for a customer from a high shelf and having like, ten of them fall on top of her and I felt bad to make her day worse, but someone needed to fix the infestation.  I told Jake’s friend it was nice to see her and that I had to go since she had started asking me questions about myself.  Telling the friends of your ex anything about yourself is never a good idea, especially when your ex’s friends are the type of people who will not only deliver whatever information you give them to your ex, they will create an extremely crude version of what you said.  If I had told her, “Yeah, life’s good.  I just cured AIDS,” she would tell him, “she said you gave her AIDS.”  That kind of thing.  Even though I bid her farewell, she continued speaking to me which was irritating.  First of all, a grocery store is not the place to play catch up.  That’s what margarita bars and tumbleweed throwing competitions are for.  Duh.  I listened a few more minutes, doing that whole walk away slowly thing while checking the time and repeatedly saying, “I have to go,” and she still didn’t get it.  After seeing that this girl’s ability to pick up on social cues was on the same level of Muammar Gadaffi, I just abruptly turned and walk away.  When I got home, I gave Makayla some cherries so she would have antioxidants radiating throughout her body and told Matt I know too many people in this town.

Someone Should Let Matt Know...

Excuse me, but I am going to need someone to go ahead and let Matt know that tickling is not a wrestling move.  Matt and I often times enjoy what I like to think of as competitive battle.  Matt’s idea of competitive battle is to tickle me and kiss me.  I have told him many times, “While we are wrestling, we are enemies.  Do not kiss me.  This is a competition, goddamit.”

His reply is to typically hold me down and face rape me as I threaten to spit on him.  Matt has advantages to wrestling that I do not.  For example, he is physically capable of picking me up and lying me down on the floor so he can straddle me and tickle me until I scream and threaten to pee on him.  He likes to tell me, “that’s what the steam cleaner is for.”  Whatever.  I cannot physically put Matt to the ground without kneeing him in his man area, which I would never do.  So in order to wrestle, I have to ask him to lie on the ground which is humiliating.  During the act of battle, I am typically totally overpowered by Matt, unless I get extremely enraged.  This happened last night.  After infuriating me by forcing his man kisses during our wrestling match, he decided he would take it upon himself to LICK the inside of my ear.  Matt knows my ear is one of the few orifices I do not find enjoyment in being penetrated.  Yet he did it anyway.  The feeling of his New Jersey bred slobber, the knowledge that such a foreign culture had physically entered my ear, sent me into a rage.  I pushed him away from me, even though he was pinning me down, and for a second, was slightly alarmed that the force of my push would result in a severe head injury because he fell backwards so quickly near the wall.  He recovered well though, and as he came after me, I lunged at him, used all my limbs to pin him down, and thoroughly tongue raped his ear.  As I dry heaved on top of him, trying to enjoy my victory of FINALLY overpowering him, he claimed he was overpowered because “he was laughing too hard.”  I do not recall Matt laughing whatsoever.  After I assured him I was not going to vomit on account of his ears tasting like Star Jones, I let him know that he had physically been overpowered by me, a girl, when I was in a condition of what I like to refer to as “a fit of tickle and spit induced rage.”  Even now, he maintains he was not overpowered, but just laughing too hard to do anything about my warrior instincts.  I maintain this gives me a perfect excuse to call him a douche monster and let him know that any cop in West Texas would not only throw tickets at him through his open driver’s side window, but also make fun of his sissy accent. I find endless entertainment on account of his heritage. 

       Wrestling is not the only sport that Matt likes to cheat at when I win.  Let’s take darts for example.  Matt likes to beg me to play darts with him after we have both opened a cold beverage.  I nearly always start off winning, but by the end of the game and four beers down, I only want to argue with him about politics and religion and make sure he knows that I am not 100% certain that I’m OK with reproducing with someone from a third world country.  So I’ll purposely screw up on darts and let him win so he’ll entertain my conversations.  He claims this is a lie.  Are you going to trust a West Texas girl or a dude who calls a remote control a “clicker” because of his Yankee culture?  And let’s not mention the sport of being hot.  I know how to pop my butt in many different black girl modes and can move my hips like a raging Spanish homosexual man.  I had a luscious black girl named Neecee show me how to properly snap my fingers with “attitude.”  No matter that she let me know after a few lessons that I was nothing other than highly offensive.  So what if my dreams of being ethnic were forever ruined?  Matt’s idea of being a sexual beast is to hiss, “Yeeesssss,” when I announce I am ready for penetration or to hop on the bed like a spider monkey grin at me like a serial killer when I tell him I’m feeling stimulated after watching him do man stuff.  Never mind that I enjoy a solid chest bump after vigorous fornication or pop out my stomach to show him the result of what unprotected sex would be and ask him if I’d still be hot, I’m still WAY better at being a seductive sportsman. 

       Swimming is also a sport that Matt likes to cheat at.  At the pool yesterday, after deciding to neglect my motherly duties of ensuring my child isn’t a victim of drowning or a noodle attack, I instructed Makayla to sit on the step and challenged Matt to a swimming contest.  The goal was to get to the number four on the other side of the pool.  While he got there first, I was distracted on account of my bikini falling off and ended up swimming further than he did.  It was decided by myself and the lifeguard who I didn’t even bribe, that while Matt got to the number four first, I swam further.  This obviously means I would have won had I not lost track of where I was going.  Then we had a diving contest.  Since Matt refused to do backwards diving and insisted on diving off an actual diving board, I lost horribly.  I have been victim to many an injury on a diving board on account that I am as agile as a rhinoceros giving birth.  I wanted to just dive off the side of the pool but Matt insisted on diving off the dangerous ledge.  He went first and did some sort of Marine, swift, perfect form type dive.  When it was my turn, as I instructed my body to not hurl itself onto the concrete on the side of the pool, I did some sort of weird dive thing that was more like a front flip.  I haven’t dived since last summer.  I needed practice.  I gave Matt this information and challenged him to a back diving competition since I am somehow better at doing things backwards than forwards.  He claimed his ears would get infected with any more diving.  I am certain this is an excuse because he knew I would dominate him in this activity.  Oh, and how about wall climbing?  I let Matt know I would be dominating him in this sport and he managed to get higher on the wall than me on the hardest part.  It’s not my fault I’m afraid of heights and he’s not, Ok?  Anyway, I allowed Matt to have that victory.  I like to do at least one good deed a day and was ready to have that burden out of the way.  It’s like the time when we went to the batting cages and I forgot my batting glove and the vibration off the bat was really messing with me.  As Matt whacked balls towards my face, I realized that while it might LOOK like he was better at baseball than me, he was only being fooled on account of me forgetting my batting glove.  I consider myself to be a highly obnoxious person but I am still able to let a competitor know if he or she is better than me.  Like, Matt is better than me at growing unusual amounts of man hair.  Why would I take that victory away from him?  He is better than me at giving each other piggy back rides and picking each other up.  The first and last time I tried to pick Matt up, I injured my back in such a way that I lied in the hallway for twenty minutes and told him to “go away” whenever he tried to assist me.  Matt is better at working on cars than me since I don’t need to know how to do all that crap because that’s what he’s for.  He is better at social skills because annoying people are typically told by me that they are full of horseshit, and he just smiles and ignores it.  So I am totally willing to admit that Matt is better at certain things than I am.  But when it comes to things he is clearly cheating at, I really do think he should have some sort of consequence.

The Helicopter Mommy

So, after the disaster that ensued after trying to bake cookies with Makayla, we decided that an evening of her riding her bike would be a good way to deal with our disappointment.  Honestly, I wasn’t disappointed or surprised since my baking abilities are equivalent to that of a squash, but Makayla was devastated that Matt’s cookies ended up resembling mashed potatoes and tasted like earwax.  So I wrapped her up in her child safety devices and jogged behind her as she rode her bike up and down the sidewalk.  My biggest fear in the entire world is having some pedophile snatch one of my offspring and I am quite ridiculous, according to most, when it comes to ensuring that a pedophile is never given the opportunity to steal them.  So I jogged behind her as she rode her bike, and she fell twice.  I treated each experience as if Hiroshima had just happened and was horrified to think of my child having her face maimed by the bicycle chain, which has happened to me on two separate occasions.  I admit, my behavior was extreme and ridiculous.  The first fall, she somehow managed to land head first onto the concrete and I was thankful that I was thoughtful enough to not only require she wear wrist, elbow, and knee protectors, but a head protector as well.  She was scared by the fall and it took a bit of coaxing to get her back onto her bike but she did and then flew off like lightning, enjoying the feel of speeding on her bike, only to break suddenly and skid across the sidewalk.  The second time she fell, she shooed me away, as I tried to inspect her for internal injuries.  Matt came home after we had been outside for nearly an hour, and tried to show me the way Makayla leaned to the side as she rode her bike.  By then, I was sitting on the back of his truck, having allowed Makayla to venture four houses down without her mother running after her with arms around her in the event she plummeted to the ground at any second, or a pedophile jumped out from a bush.  Matt was highly annoyed that I refused to watch him and refused to take my eyes off Makayla for a single second. 

“Just come do your demonstration over here, so I can keep an eye on the both of you,” I said, motioning for him to come from behind my back, to the direction where Makayla was riding.

He said he’d tell me later and started unloading his car.  I knew I had annoyed him but wasn’t too worried about it.  A conversation about a child who has bad habits in bike riding can be discussed at any time.  A child being snatched by a pedophile can happen in the three minutes you look away.  Matt determined that I was “coddling” Makayla and let me know that I just needed to let her be a kid.  This idea was only further influenced when the next door neighbor’s boyfriend pulled up in his truck.  Makayla stopped her bike, came next to my side, and said, “I will wait until he is inside of his house because I don’t even know that guy.”  She watched him as he got out of his truck, went into the garage, and closed the garage door.

“Do you think it’s safe to ride past now?” she asked.

“Go ahead,” I told her.

She rode to the fourth house, turned around, and let Matt and I know, “That guy will probably steal me.  That’s why I had to wait until he was gone.”

“He probably wouldn’t, but you don’t know him, so you never know,” I told her, “He probably wouldn’t, but he might, so it’s best to stay near Mommy if someone you don’t know comes around.”

It’s not like Makayla has zero social skills.

“I’m still shy,” she informed Matt and I earlier.  But she will warm up to someone who I am with within a few minutes.  She is polite and sweet to people, very respectful.  As a couple walked down the street earlier, she told them “hello,” and then said, “I still want to wait until they are gone before I ride my bike down there.  I don’t know those people.”

Am I overprotective?  I have had most people tell me I am.  But I don’t care.  It’s not like a have a thirty year old who is overly wary of people they don’t know.  I have a six year old little girl, who would be defenseless in the event some freak tried to snatch her.  At the park, if an adult she doesn’t know starts lurking around, she’ll come straight to my side until or unless I tell her I think the person is safe.  If someone at the grocery line engages her in conversation, she’ll motion for me to come down to her level and whisper in my ear, “Is it OK to talk to him/her?”  99% of the time, people like that are telling her what a good girl she is, or how cute she is, and I allow these conversations to take place.  I remember one time, when she was four, some freak behind us told her, “You’re really sexy, just like you’re mommy.”  When she asked if she was allowed to speak to this person, I told her no, put her in front of me, and stood facing this person until we checked out, as he wiggled his tongue at me and winked.  I then had a manager walk us to our truck.  On another occasion, Makayla and I were walking into Wal-Mart, and some dude who was sitting on a bench at the front of the store told me what a beautiful child I had and let me know he loved children.  I was automatically alarmed because I feel like a normal human male would not say such a disturbing thing to a little girl’s mother.  As Makayla and I shopped, every time I looked back, he was there.  He followed us aisle to aisle until I picked up a five year old Makayla, put her in the back of the basket, and continued shopping.  I alerted an employee of the situation and as the employee went to get a manager, the weird dude tried talking to me again.

“I have never seen such a beautiful child,” he said, “I’ve always wanted kids.”

I refused to say a word to this person, picked up Makayla, left my groceries, and went to the front to get a manager.  Sadly, in my hasty retreat, I left my wallet in the cart and never saw it again.  That evening, I carried Makayla to the car as two managers escorted me.  After the viewing of the video, the man received his own picture posted in Wal-Mart, alerting anyone who saw him to report him to managers, as he had been banned. 

Even before these atrocious people further perpetuated my fear that lunatics are everywhere, I have always been extremely careful about my kids.  When they were babies, if I had to reach over and get a thing of meat at the store, I’d keep one hand on their stomachs in the event someone tried to snatch them out of their carseat that was in the front of the basket, even though they were strapped in.  When we go to crowded places like Six Flags, I keep my kids on one of those child leash things in the event some pedophile tries to run by and snatch them.  Mommy dearest has a large clip attached to her own leash device so in the event a pedophile attempted to run by and snatch my children, they would be dragging me along with them.  That’s right people.  In large crowds, I use metal devices to attach myself to my children and still insist they hold my hand.  When the kids play at the park, I follow them around instead of sitting on the bench, to make all around me aware that there is a ninja adult ready to defend their lives.  If Makayla climbs up the jungle gym to go down a slide, I go with her.  If she runs from the slide to go to a swing, I run after her.  I don’t leave the kids with sitters.  I don’t let them play outside unless I am literally RIGHT there.  And I have had people tell me, “Honestly Jess, what’s the worst that can happen?  The chances of someone kidnapping them are slim to none.”

So what?  The fear, agony, terror, screaming for their mommy while some freak brutalizes them before he slits their throats and throws them in a ditch is more than enough motivation for me to be what some have called, “the helicopter mommy.”  I could understand if I was treating teenagers like this.  But my children are six and three.  I honestly don’t see a problem with this.