There are some mornings I wake up and I just know it’s going to be a Miss Piggy day. Everything in me wants to eschew all socially acceptable behavior, get my ire up, throw some wildly irrational tantrums and karate chop offenders Hiiii-yah! right in the throat. Today is one of those days. On anabolic steroids.

Update: Still pissed. The issue remains largely ignored and thus, unresolved. Disrespect is gross.

“Oh crap! Fire!”

I turn in the keys to my apartment today. If you listen carefully, sometime around noon Central Time, you’ll hear a gigantic sigh of relief.

The transition is nearly complete. My mattress has even been given away. And I’m totally not nervous. Because if the Boy turns me out on the street, I’ve always got an Aerobed in the trunk.
   

If I had bothered with Facebook status updates while I was away in Utah, you’d have noticed a strong central theme developing around Oreo consumption. But updating was out of the question as I was just far too busy eating chocolate sandwich cookies and rolling around on the carpet with my stupidly cute nephew to find time to share the joy of my gluttony and sloth. I wish you could all see my nephew do The Worm. Soon it will evolve into actual crawling, but right now it’s more like break dancing and it is a sight to behold. So is the room full of adults (many of whom witnessed the live telecast of the first moon landing) oohing and aahing and clapping as though it were truly the most amazing thing we’ve ever seen. 

The Boy, as predicted, got along so well – so naturally – with my family, it felt as though there had always been a spot for him in our brood. Like, the corner piece of a giant floor puzzle that ended up beneath the sofa, discovered on accident much later. “Oh, there you are!” That’s how I’ve always felt about him – like he was around here somewhere and as soon as I spotted him, I just knew he’d fit right into that empty space. Spending time with my father was somewhat anticlimactic, as my dad did what he always does in the face of new and possibly uncomfortable situations. He didn’t show up. Missed graduation entirely. The details aren’t important, but when it comes to choosing between understanding his shortcomings and being pissed off, I’ve gone with pissed off. It feels right.

Got dandruff, some of it itches!

When I was a kid, my dad swore like a sailor. Or rather, a G.I. I’m pretty certain that the depth and breadth of his swears catalog was developed somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam – where he also picked up a love of the drink and one or two pretty little drug addictions. Not that he admitted to that sort of first hand knowledge when we were young. Back then, he’d “read it in a book.” Back then, he also used to end all of his swears with, “don’t tell your mother.”

He’d give Jesus a new, colorful middle name and then top it off by asking us to keep his potty mouth a secret. As though there was any keeping to be done. Mom knew full well what could leak out of his mouth. And while she herself very rarely even ventured into the hells and damns (though, I vaguely recall the shock of hearing her yell the non-family-approved version of “Shoot!” when something once went horribly awry), there was very little she could do about my pop’s penchant for obscenity.

We were forbidden from following his example, however. Hell, we couldn’t even say, “shut up” or call someone stupid in our household. Mom had stewardship over our souls, and until we were old enough to be tasked with the burden of our own eternal salvations, well, it was pay heed or get the soap. I’m laughing to myself now because my lord, soap tasted bad – worse than any fruits-of-the-forest stuff they make now. Oh, the lengths I went to in order to avoid chomping down on a slimy bar of Dad’s Lava soap.

That didn’t mean we wouldn’t come as close to the line as possible without actually stepping over it. If dad was a creative swearer, we were creative non-swearers. While a slip at the tool bench could send Dad challenging the legitimacy of your birth, your mother’s virtue and the lord’s divinity, we’d myna bird away, employing only technically clean and mother-approved language.

“Got dandruff, some of it itches!”

My favorite was, “Frickin’ frackin’ dan it!” Dad would chuckle and warn that we were going to get him in trouble.

One night during family night, my mom decided to offer us a lesson on swears. In the process of making chocolate chip cookies together, she pulled out a bag of rat poison and proceeded to add its contents to the mix. We lost our brains. Noooo, we wailed until she showed us that, in reality, the contents were brown sugar and we stopped our tears. From now on, she told us, we need to see bad language and misbehavior as the rat poison in our lives. We don’t want bad behavior in our home any more than we do rat poison in our cookies. We supposed she had a point. We really liked cookies. She then tasked us each with policing each other – even Dad – in order to crack down on the evil that was gripping our household. From then on we were to yell, “Rat poison!” at the offender of our domestic bliss. Oh, what eager and self-righteous youngsters we were in taking up that banner.

“Rat poison!” we’d yell, at the slightest provocation. I don’t have to tell you how long that lasted with my father, whose entire gritty existence was a celebration of rebellion. And as satisfying as saving his soul may have been, we were more afraid of his wrath than of eating rat-poisoned cookies.