Due to Extenuating Circumstances

The Imes Women Get a Pedicure

Mac is away for a week doing Very Important Scholarly Things. My parents let me move in with them so I can get some very needed help with el Niño. Before I get to the good bit, a tangent:

My abdomen is disintegrating like one ply toilet paper in the Pacific. No joke, I’m running out of tricks to compensate. Real would be an accurate assessment of how the shit is getting. While mom and dad help it gives me more time and avenues to procure all of my medical records from every person who has seen me in the last 3-5 years. Applying to the Mayo Clinic is no longer done by referral. You have to choose the 50 pages that best sums up your issues, surgeries, consults, MRI, x-rays, everything.  The Clinic then decides whom to see.

I have been an actress for 21 years . I have auditioned to be:

• a girl who holds a Campbell soup sign
• an American girl willing to let a team of English people cover her in shaving cream
• a home development expert that focuses on choosing the right carpet
• and while living in London I auditioned to be the video game voice of an American Army officer, where I was told, I’m not making this up, that I had done OK but there’s a certain type of American accent for this and it was a solid effort but my accent wasn’t American enough. He did tell me he thought with a dialect coach I could get the exact hang of it–my American accent could be perfect.
• The point is, I have auditioned for so many stupid things in so many stupid ways I RESENT auditioning for medical care.
  • end of rant tangent. Thank you.

Mom was going to help me get Baby into the carseat, we’d collapse the stroller, and go to the nail salon.

Here is what happened:

Using baby gear somebody else has bought is so, so confusing. I don’t think companies make more than one of every gate, highchair or stroller on the planet. Each piece of baby gear is lovingly crafted by hand, to be just that much different from every other on the planet.

I had to get the baby gate down. How does this gate go down? You simply lift the thing, marked with the red, but why is the black thing marked on in pen, which means, so I lift here? No. Do I push here? No. Do I lift towards the

CRASH.

Well. Excellent. My next guess was going to be the chainsaw in the garage. Get stroller, get stomach brace on, lift baby into stroller, must buckle him because we need to go down stairs into garage. But the straps are– why doesn’t this one come out? If I put that one there, then I’m left with a diagonal strap that does nothing…oh. Under his butt? Sure, I mean, I just need to get him to the car and UGH. Hurts to push. Maybe pulling is better. Pull down the AAHHRRGG– baby hanging perilously off one end of the stroller. I guess that’s what the other diagonal thingie should have prevented?

My mom comes to the car. Mom can’t lift due to a recent neck injury, I can’t put the baby away from my torso if I’m holding him, neither of us is great on buckling. Still. It’s not like we’re morons or anything.

We’re morons.

I pick him up out of the AGAHSHSAHAHHH. Oh dear God. I undo the mystery buckle. I pick him up again, without the stroller hanging off his ass. Successfully. My abs are already burning worse than that torch you carried for your junior high crush. Then I have to get him to mom, and she can twist him into the seat, so that takes a couple of tries. Now mom gets out and I get in to buckle, but…would SOMEBODY PLEASE MAKE BUCKLES YOU DON’T HAVE TO SET THE BABY ON TOP OF?? It was another five minutes of maneuvering and squishing his fat little appendages under canvas straps, loosening, buckling, tightening.

We now need to collapse the stroller. Mom doesn’t know how. She bought it secondhand and they may have shown her how to collapse it but she can’t remember at all. I figure it has a button on it that says “push” and red thingies; those must be key to the process. They are. They are key to obstructing all progress. I push, pull, turn, hit with my hands, my legs, my knees, I’m beginning to wonder if you’re supposed to offer it some lewd favor in return for cooperation…?

You could achieve world peace if weapons were labelled this way. I keep pressing, pulling, trying to bend things, feel for joints or weak spots or… anything. Anything that seems like it will alter the configuration of the stroller. And the basket down below fell off. Thanks for that, you snarky little piece of shit baby gear. I can lift you, whole, and just stick you in the back of my mother’s extended hatchba– oh, no. No, I can’t. I can hear mom saying “it won’t fit! It won’t fit!” and I’m thinking “it will if I take that chainsaw I see in the corner to it, so help me, God” but at last, painfully, I admit defeat. This stroller is like the physics question of baby gear: can we truly ever understand or alter its nature? Can your essence be manipulated for our purposes or will even the great minds of our time fall short gazing into the infinite complexities of your composition?

We gave up. We left the stroller in the garage and drove to the salon, where everybody loved him. Which is only fair, he’s quite lovable.

But mom and I have dark plans for that stroller. Down the rabbit hole, comic book villain, we WILL collapse you or die trying, ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk? types of thoughts. I want to keep that chainsaw handy.