It’s On. At Least for 3 Months. And then it’s Off.

One time I tried to join The Compact.  Do you know what that is?  It’s not a witch type of thing, or any kind of pact for murdering people.  It’s not a suicide-ish thing.  Or a bargain with my neighbor to please accidentally run over one of my cats who will not stop having his way with all my nice sweaters.  Though as I write that out, I’m thinking it’s not an awful idea.  Do you have a pet you want dead?  I can send Ivy over and she’ll make it look like an accident or really fucking deliberate, whatever you like.  But you have to respond in kind.  The cat’s name is Bob.  He’s about 800 pounds and is usually in the back yard making sweet love to cardigans.  Can’t miss him.

The Compact was/maybe still IS this group on Yahoo who makes a pact not to buy anything new for a whole year.  The rules are basically that you can get food and prescriptions and personal products like deoderant and also, stuff like cleaning supplies and I think new underwear are allowed.  But that’s it.  That’s right, nothing new for an entire year. You are allowed to buy anything used.  You are allowed to borrow, or barter.  This means you can go crazy at the hipster vintage boutiques and not get arrested. But it also means that if you break all your dishes in a tragic dish breaking accident, you gotta go buy used dishes at the Goodwill.  Now maybe this sounds easy enough, but to me not buying anything new for a year sounds like torture.  But today I realized I need to try this again.  So I’m trying it for three months.  That’s it.  And when it’s over, I’m going to go to Target and I’m going to kneel in the dollar section aisle and kiss the ground.

This morning Hazel had a field trip.  It was raining and the field trip was basically a nature hike in the woods.  As she’s getting out of the car, I realize she has no jacket.  This is pretty much what happens all the time.  My kids are always dressed for another climate, a different decade, an entirely different human race or an episode of Getting Dressed in the Dark.  (There’s no show called that, but there should be.  Are you listening TLC?) Anyway, Ivy is still dressing in tights and a t-shirt.  Every single day.  Tights.  T-shirt.  What this means is that through her tights you can see her bunched up Cinderella undies.  Also, it doesn’t matter what she wears, there is something about this child’s anatomy (long torso?  short ass? skinny legs?) that makes it impossible for her not to show her butt crack all the time.  This is exacerbated by the fact that when she’s concentrating, or not concentrating, when she’s walking or standing still, when she’s eating or drinking or singing or talking or not talking, she has her hands down the back of her pants as if she just wants to be sure her butt is still there.

Oh good, my ass is still there. Just checking!!

Almost every photo I have where she’s pictured from behind, she has her hands down the back of her pants like oh good, there’s my ass. I say: “Ivy, get your hands out of your pants.”  about 8,500 times a day.  Clyde is mostly okay on the dressing front.  He sometimes cross dresses, but in a sensible way.  He knows that he needs to wear a jacket over the princess dress and that heels are a bitch on the playground.  Yesterday he wore a seersucker suit, like the whole thing, blazer and all.  Then there’s Hazel who will never wear a jacket over anything because she wants everyone to notice her outfit and how shitastic it is.  This morning, we are (as usual) in a rush and at drop-off, Hazel realizes she’s got no jacket and I think, well fuck now what? Because it has already started to drizzle and she’s in a T-shirt.  I can’t go all the way home because it’s too far and the field trip bus will have left.  So I head to nearby Target which is much closer.  Target thinks it’s almost June.  I also think this.  But the weather is like Fuck you, it’s actually December.  Here I’ll prove it with rain! So there is not one single hoodie or jacket in all of Target.  There aren’t even long sleeved shirts. Eventually I find a very flimsy looking track jacket on clearance and buy two so she can layer them.  Then I hustle back to school, put them in her backpack outside the classroom door, accost this kid in her class who is coming out of the bathroom and (because he always has this vacant look on his face,) grab him by the shoulders and say: “Tell Hazel I went and got her some track jackety things and she can layer them and they’ll probably still be not enough but maybe if she wears them together she’ll be okay and I put them in her backpack in the main pocket and I already took off the tags and tell her I know they look like boy track jackets but they are no way boys because I found them in the girl section, tell her that okay?  Tell her I found them in the girl section.”  And he just stands there blinking.

I get back in the car where I have left Clyde and Ivy and as bribery for not setting anything on fire in the car while I was babbling to the bathroom boy, I have told them we will stop for hot chocolate.  As we’re pulling up to pre-school, I tell Ivy that she needs to finish up her hot chocolate and maybe because she’s drinking too fast, she chokes or coughs or laughs at the voices in her head and hot chocolate explodes out of her mouth with the velocity of water from a fire hydrant.  And now her cream colored hoodie is obliterated and her tights are covered and of course her face.  My god, her face.  So she starts crying like, my tights, my precious see-through tights! And I do what any mother would do – I rub it in the tights and say: “See magic, no one can see the chocolate on your black tights!” Then I walk the kids up to the door of the preschool and the preschool teacher asks the usual question: “What the fuck is on your face Ivy?”  No, they don’t swear.  I mean they might.  It’s a Spanish immersion preschool and so they say “What the fuck is on your face Ivy?” in Spanish.  And I nod and laugh and say Sí, like I know what the hell they are talking about even though the only thing I remember from high school spanish is how to say: “I like to go to the discoteque and also the library.” But I definitely can’t say “What the fuck is on your face Ivy?” which, as you know, would be considerably more helpful.

Where was I going with this?  Oh yeah, The Compact.  So the bad Target trip made me think that maybe I keep buying things to cover up for other problems.  Like my daughter, despite being reminded, forgot her jacket.  Or that buying two Fedoras from the accessories section won’t change the fact that I have never or will never look passable in a hat.  The kids don’t need more toys.  I don’t need more dresses or bikinis that don’t fit.

I know that if my husband is reading this, he has just spat Coke Zero all over his computer and yelled BULLSHIT.  Because he knows that me and Target are like this (I’m pressing my index finger and my fuck you finger together) and that me not buying anything from Target or Forever 21 or Anthropologie or The Bloggess (there’s a rumor she’s putting her HOUSE on eBay!) is about as likely as someone actually taking me up on the cat murder thing.  But we’re going to prove him wrong, right? Me with The Compact thing, and one of you good souls with the unfortunate cat accident.  Who’s in?

Tagged as: Cat Murder, Clyde, Hazel, ivy, Patron Saint of Lost Causes, St. Jude