Pants and Undies that Fall Down Every Five Minutes

Posted September 22, 2008

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Ben and Birdy

Sometimes, I see, in my peripheral vision, the mother I am trying to be. There she is! It's a Sunday morning, and she has gotten up early, scrubbed clean her face and teeth, swept back her shining hair, and crept downstairs in a flowered kimono to make breakfast for her family. The aroma of baking raspberry-buttermilk scones will rise seductively up to her husband and children, beckon them down to the sunny table set with juice glasses and a pitcher of nodding zinnias!

And, oh, I am so close. Even though there's no nice hair or flowered kimono, only bedhead, a crumpled tank top, and men's underpants. And even though what actually happens is that, one after another, my family members descend to stand at the bottom of the stairs, wrinkle up their noses, and say, "Oh my god, what is that smell?"

Funny they should ask. Because it's not the smell of Jammy Scones, which are indeed sitting fragrantly on the pretty table. No. What that smell is is the smell of roasting mouse urine. And it smells just like you imagine it would: as if a protesting cat has set her own litter box on fire. Birdy covers her face with her hands and runs upstairs, gagging. She yells down, "Somebody please bring me up a scone!" Ben gamely munches a scone with one hand, while the other hand occupies itself with the pinching shut of his nose. "This is good," he says, nasally. "At least, I think it is. I can't actually taste it."

While the cat's away, the mouse will play. Or, rather, while the people are away, the mice will play. In their oven. Peeingly. When I imagined us owning a house, I think I saw it as a slideshow of still-lifes: a glass door framed by blooming peonies; a cloud-dotted sky framed by blowing white curtains; a gleaming wood floor framed by slanted sunlight. Maybe I've been reading too many beautiful blogs? I don't know. I am somewhat surprised to discover how dynamic it is all the time: The blue jays splashing in our water-filled gutter like it's a birdbath! The moths flapping around our faces at night, as big as bats! Water seeping in everywhere, leaking out everywhere, standing still to fill with mosquito larvae! Every day I cannot believe our luck - that we live in this beautiful house. But at night I listen to the mice in the walls. The owl hoots from the huge maple, and the mice answer with a chorus of terrified squeaking. "I'm not crazy about the mice living here," I say to Michael, who is sleeping. Or was. "It makes me feel, I don't know, like our home is kind of infested or something." "Maybe that's because of the mouse infestation," he says, and returns to sleep.

Very occasionally something isn't really a metaphor, is it. It just is what it is. Like when we finished stacking our cord of wood, and I looked at it and said, "Wow! That gives me such a great feeling of security! As if..." "As if, come winter, there will be wood to burn?" Michael had said. Indeed.

So, I guess, what I feel like is a person with mice in the walls. Also, a person who gets up parched in the night after a wine-soaked dinner party and, because there is no cup in the bathroom, guzzles water from a cup-shaped bath toy - the kind with a spout hole in the bottom. I stand there drinking furiously while water simultaneously pours out onto my shirt, and when I tell Michael this the next day he asks reasonably, "Why didn't you plug the hole with your finger?" Good question.

"If it was the hottest day of the year, would you rather walk into town in your snowsuit or naked?" Another good question. "Oooh, that's a hard one," I say to Ben. "What would you pick?" "Definitely snowsuit," he says, then asks, "Would you rather walk into town completely bare naked or wearing pants and undies that, pffff" - here he pantomimes them falling down around his ankles - "fall down every five minutes." For some reason, pants and undies that fall down every five minutes feels like the perfect metaphor for my life in this particular moment. "You know what?" I say. "I think I'd rather be just plain naked." And Ben says, "Me too."

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Pants and Undies that Fall Down Every Five Minutes

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Pants and Undies that Fall Down Every Five Minutes

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