I went out tonight. I hardly ever go out, so this was a relatively big deal. And when I say “hardly ever”, I mean really, seriously, hardly ever. When you say “hardly ever”, you mean “only once a week”. When I say “hardly ever”, I mean once every six months. Which is OK with me. The baby needs me now, she won’t need me for much longer, at least not so much that I can’t go out.
Anyway, because I never go out, I pulled out all the stops. I got a dress, called in a favour from my sister for babysitting, scheduled a full hour after playdates and skating and before I had to leave for the elaborate ritual I like to call “having a shower”. Crazy, I know! Never let it be said that I don’t know how to have a good time. I was also hoping to, you know, apply makeup, maybe pluck my eyebrows, and perhaps even do my hair. Unfortunately, the kids didn’t get the memo. If they had, they would have seen that it was completely necessary that they be quiet and good between the hours of four and five. Were they?
No.
The first step in my prep was to apply a face mask, the peel off kind that gets first shiny and scary tight and then you peel it off slowly and it looks like you’re an alien emerging from a seed pod. I love those masks. They are so so creepy but work so so well. (I have rosacea and for whatever reason, the horrifying reality of slowly ripping off what must be the outer epidermis gives my skin the appearance of being briefly almost not too horrible.) So I applied the goo with every intention of removing it after ten minutes as the instructions emphasize. TEN MINUTES MAX. I read it! I know! Ten minutes. Not a second more.
But then the baby started to cry.
And cry.
And cry.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that the baby almost never cries. Furthermore, she didn’t seem specifically upset about anything. She wasn’t tired, didn’t need changing, wasn’t hungry. Just… crying. Finally, I balanced her on the floor near my feet and let her wail. At least if I could see her, I felt pretty confident that she wasn’t choking on a poisonous leaf that Linden brought her from the garden, or playing with a scary looking house spider, or sucking a disgusting cigarette butt that she had clutched in her hand since we were at the beach three hours before. She may have been miserable, but I knew she was safe.
I was about to undertake the face peel when Linden popped his head into the bathroom and said, “Don’t come in here, Mummy. I mean it. Don’t come in.”
A sure sign that he was up to NO GOOD. Going into the kitchen, I took note of the fact that every cupboard and drawer was open, including the Sharp Knife Drawer. Never in history has he shown any interest in any kitchen cupboard. Or drawer, for that matter. Following the trail of water (!), I found him in the living room, whipping the lake of water he’d poured (i.e. scratching the hardwood floor finish off) with the whisk. “I told you not to come here!” he said, total outrage literally dripping from his every pore. Oh, no, that wasn’t outrage, it was water. Water, water everywhere.
“Sorry Mummy,” he added. “Sorry! Sorry! I said sorry! SORRY!”
After a brief fracas, I managed to get the now sobbing boy on the naughty chair, cradled the crying girl in my arms, cleaned up the water, and once again faced my shiny, scary face in the mirror. The mask was by then so tight that all my features appeared to be being pulled towards my nose, making my forehead and chin look smooth and young and the rest of my face look like the visage of a well-varnished apple-person. Not pretty. Using my one free hand, I began to pull the mask off. It hurt. It was nowhere near as fun and satisfying as I remember it being. It was pretty much just straight up pain.
A lot of pain.
So I did it really fast, because pain is better (is it?) if you get it over with quickly. On the plus side, it came off mostly in one piece, which in my world feels like a big accomplishment, like getting all the peel of an orange without breaking it. If you’ve ever done one of these types of masks, you know you always look at it after you’ve pulled it off. I have no idea why. Well, maybe you don’t do it at all. But I do. It’s like, “Ew! Gross! It looks like skin!” Except this time, it was more like, “Ew! Gross! Holy crap! Is that my eyebrow?” And it was. The top half of my left eyebrow, in case you care. Stuck to the mask skin, that creepy scary mask skin, which was now in my hand.
I guess on the plus side, I’d planned to pluck my brows anyway and this allowed me to skip a step. I don’t necessarily recommend it though, not even as a time-saver. If it happens to you, I would advise that you fill in the new eyebrowless void with eyebrow pencil, something I personally forgot to do, and so went through the evening looking like the victim of some kind of fraternity hazing gone wrong.
Anyway I hurried through the rest of the getting ready ritual (something I vaguely remember as being “fun” but that was in a previous life when I didn’t have two smaller life forms experimenting with knife throwing in the hallway), threw on my dress without zipping it up because I couldn’t reach, selected shoes, found a purse big enough to accommodate my camera, etc. And I made it to the dinner only forty five minutes later than I’d planned, which is practically the same as being early, if you’re me.
The evening was fun, the dinner was OK, the event itself was a great success — and I have four glass trophies in the car to prove it, with Clayton’s name and Flock engraved on them.
It was only when I got home that I realized that I never HAD got around to zipping up my dress. Maybe that’s why I don’t get invited out more often?