the darnedest things

BY ELIZABETH BASTOS

"The Darnedest Things" is brought to you today by the Cyrillic alphabet, the number 782.96, and the enormously witty Elizabeth Bastos who knows that, despite the squawking, most moms don't live on Sesame Street.

KID FOOD OVER TIME

Neanderthal kid: What's for dinner?
Neanderthal mom: Musk ox haunch, Dear.

1950's kid: What's for dinner?
1950's Mom: Meatloaf and mashed hope. I mean potatoes.

1980's kid: What's for dinner?
1980s mom: Tang.

Post-structuralist 1990's kid: Dinner is a construct, and no one culture can can claim "dinner."
Post-structuralist 1990's mom: Then I will lead us in a what I hope will be a fruitful discussion of multicultural take-out options.

Today's kid: What's for dinner?
Today's mom: Fair-traded and shade-grown locally-sourced root vegetables. And I thought I'd caramelize something. Possibly kale foam gelatin gobs. So, give me a hand with that kitchen torch, Dear. We're going for texture.

SNOW: A KINDERGARTEN BOY'S GUIDE

What is snow? It is snowy.  Don't ask me to spell that.

Where the dog peed in the snow is yellow. It's a boy dog. Just like that dog, Daddy has a penis. Don't ask me to spell that.

Sometimes, if no one is around, you can make an ice ball.

But you shouldn't.

A snow day is when it is so snowy the school closes, and then you stay home and wait, while your mom pretends it's still school, but at home, and gets out the lined paper. And the crafts basket.

You have to make a scene with glitter glue and cut out snowflakes. You can spell that.

L-A-M-E.

All your friends' moms are probably letting them make ice balls. 

COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS

The holidays are a time to count your blessings. For instance, I am so blessed and thankful for this product called Shout. It does "shout things out" -- just as the commercial says. I have shouted grass stains out of my son's white kindergarten uniform, while myself throwing dishware and shouting: "Fuck you, white shirts for 5-year-olds! Fuck you, grassblades you staining motherfuckers!" And this holiday season, I am further blessed and thankful no one heard me.

Also, many gifts have been bestowed upon me, including a really great mop. And a pair of leopard-print dish gloves that come up above the elbow, sexy-like, as if doing the dishes was one iota sexy to the person doing them. So actually, I don't like those dish gloves. Strike those dish gloves from The Holiday Count Of The Blessings.

But the kids are healthy and happy and learning to spell and my husband is happy and healthy though he says he'd be even happier if Santa'd bring him Google TV and a reduced-price iPad. But I tell him: Count your blessings. This holiday season, Mommy's feeling abundantly generous; we can share the mop. There is a lot of dishware on the floor.

HOUSEHOLD WORD PROBLEMS

1. 1 can of shaving cream (opened), plus 1 naked and curious toddler, plus 1 skunked dog going north at 25 miles per hour. Where will they meet?

a) They will never meet because of the curvature of the earth.
b) Wish that was true.
c) They will meet on the new rug, of course, right before company comes over.

2. ½ a cup of flour, plus 1 cup of salt, plus vegetable peels from the compost, plus Gorilla Glue. If you add a kindergartener, what's the equation?

a) Fun!
b) Art!
c) Did you know you can glue a potato peel to your butt? You can and you should because there's company coming over.

3. Because of physics, a flat round rock flung carelessly from the hand of a preschooler will always skip several times over the water and then hit his little sister.

a) Yes.
b) No.
c) It is possible that this same rock will also hit Grandma. (The ways of the world are mysterious.)

4. When testing the depth of water, one should:

a) Jump in.
b) Use a stick.
c) Yell "Hi-Ya!" like you are so Kung Fu and jump in with a stick.

5. There are four people, who eat three times a day, and two of them have milk for at least two meals. If a glass is about six ounces, how long will a gallon of milk last? Calculate the degree to which mommy is annoyed.

a) "I want juice. Mommy! I said I wanted juice!"
b) "Why don't you get me what I like and that's not milk, that's juice. And why aren't we allowed to drink soda? Penelope and Mikey's mom allows them to drink soda. Milk is stupid."
c) All of the above, and then some.

RETELLING FAMOUS FAIRY TALES TO PLEASE MY DAUGHTER WHO IS INTO PINK, PRINCESSES, HORSES, AND BALLET

"Goldilocks and the Three Bears"

Once there was a girl named Goldilocks. She was a princess. She liked to wear pink. Pink shoes. Pink tutus, too. And it goes without saying that she loved to dance.

In fact, it was at her weekly ballet lesson, in mid-arabesque, that she met the three little bears. But they weren't bears at all. They were horses. With long flowing manes that she could comb with a little plastic comb, that came with them, in their impossible-to-open plastic clamshell packaging. Do they love to have their manes combed? You bet.

Goldilocks visited them every day in the stable at her very fancy private school for girls. And they lived happily ever after.

"The Three Little Pigs"

Once there were three little pigs who adored playing dress-up. One would say: "Does this make me look like a ballerina?" And the other two would giggle and say: "Yes!" And then they would have a tea party just for girls, no boys allowed.

"The Little Mermaid"

It goes without saying that the Little Mermaid was a gifted ballerina who did interpretive dances with seaweed about how great it was to live under the sea. It's not really important what happened to her, what's important is that she had really great long hair that spent the day partially submerged, just catching the light all corona-ish and drifting. Then later, the Little Mermaid might ride her seahorse, Dante.

"The Princess and the Pea"

It's somehow both boring and unusual that a princess would have to sleep on a pea to prove she's a princess, so be bored no more: she doesn't have to prove it. Everybody just knows she's a princess because of her great clothes that are pink and her shoes that are sparkly, and how confidently she carries herself. Her horse, Dante, is confident, too, and comes with shoes which you can play with, if you can get your mother to get them out of the packaging for you with sharp words and a hacksaw.

THE ONE-UPMANSHIP OF 5-YEAR-OLD BOYS

Little Timmy: I have five Silly Bandz.
My son: I have six Silly Bandz
(Pause)

Little Timmy: One of mine is in the shape of a flaming motorcycle crash.
My son: One of mine is in the shape of ninjas descending from a helicopter by rope ladder.
(Pause)

Little Timmy: My dad writes for action movies. Like Transformers.
Little Timmy: My mom is a really important docent. Is your mom an internationalspymodel?
(Pause)

My son: My mom is...Mooooommmmm?!?! What do you do? Oh. My mom is a writer, too.
Little Timmy: Like for Iron Man?
My son: (shame-faced) No.
Little Timmy: What does your dad do? Is he a firefighterpolicemanhelicopterpilotcowboyorbankrobber?
My son: He teaches.
Little Timmy: What? Highsecurityprisonbreakartificialintelligenterobotcandy?
My son: Just high school biology.
(Pause)

My son: I can swan dive backwards off the diving board into the deep end and then hold my breath underwater for five minutes. Much like a killer whale.
Little Timmy: So what? I could do that when I was like 2 and a half.
My son: I mean, I could do that when I was 2 and a half. too. Before I could walk even. Like when I was a newborn infant.  
(Pause)

Little Timmy: I have like one hundred six billion cool cars.
My son: I have one hundred six billion and ninety eleventeen cool cars, all of them very and extremely cool.
(Pause)

My son: Have you eaten a worm?
Little Timmy: I have.
My son: One time I found a worm nest.
Little Timmy: That's awesome.
(Pause)

My son: You want to go find sharp sticks?

(And they're off)

WHERE ARE YOUR SHOES? FROM: GETTING TO SCHOOL, THE OPERA

 Alto: Where are your shoes? Where? Are? They? Your shoes? 

Children's chorus: We don't know. We don't know. We had them yesterday. 

Bass: But where are they now? Find. Them. Now! 

Children's chorus: O help me. 

Alto (forte): No!

Children's chorus: O help me.

Bass (forte): No!

Children's chorus (weeping): Woe woe woe.

Alto and Bass (pianissimo): We must think of DSS. They cannot go shoeless. Shoeless they cannot go. Can they? No. No. They cannot go. So, though, you have offended us, you cannot go shoeless. Let us, as a family, look from every balcony for your shoes, for your shoes, for your shoes, from every balcony as a family for your shoes!

Soprano (flying onstage by a system of pulleys and wearing a fairy princess outfit): I have done it, I have found my shoes. I am faster than him. Because of my fairy wings.

Counter tenor: Mother! Father! She is taunting me. She can't wear that to school can she?

Bass: The issue is your shoes. Focus on your shoes. How has it come to this? My children, my children, how has it come to this?

Alto (in endless recitative until the curtain falls): Where are you shoes? Your footwear where is it? The ones that I bought you? That fit you. Where? Are? (hitting a high C and sustaining it) YOOOOURRRRR SHOOEEESSS?

The End of Act 1

USE YOUR NICE VOICE

 What's for dinner? I'm so happy that you're asking nicely, in a nice voice with no whining. I respond to people who ask me things their nice voices and use the pleasant, underused expression known in Italy as "por favore" and here in America and in a place called Canada as "please." Is there something else you would like to know, you precious, polite little thing? Perhaps how Mommy is feeling about all the crap in the living room?

How perceptive and empathetic! My children, how right you are! She's not feeling good about it. Her face is a sad face like the kind we sometimes stick on the Mr. Potato Head doll. Oh? You say it's not a doll, dolls are for girls? My mistake. The Mr. Potato Head toy. Gotcha. The "emotion" -- that's another word for feeling -- that Mommy is experiencing has further nuances, too.

What's a nuance, please? Dear, it comes from the Middle French -- France being another place, like Canada -- meaning a shade of meaning. You know how your crayons come in blue and light blue and also in aqua and chartreuse? Mommy's nuanced feeling when it comes to the little clay balls that you have smooshed in anger into the pile of the white carpet is a shade of hopelessness and a shade of rage. It would be best represented, if this was Crafts Time, by a very red crayon, but then you would take this red crayon, my personal Rage, and use it to color the tub in the guest bathroom and I wouldn't notice it until your Auntie JoAnn visited and asked, with her wry, critical sense of humor, if something had been killed and not yet cleaned up. I would shoot back, also smiling with all my teeth, "not yet" and you kids would notice this thing that happens sometimes among adults called "tension."

Tension is why, this year as a family, we will be going out for Thanksgiving dinner. I would tell you more if it was Circle Time and you had remained seated on your carpet squares, but you are not. It is so thrilling to launch yourself from the couch? What's so thrilling about it?

I see. Thank you for showing me by hitting me in the face with your stuffed giraffe. It is that sense of lightheadedness and disorientation.

The giraffe's glass eyes (or rather, plastic eyes -- I'm dating myself in my knowledge of quality) have come undone and now one is lost and your baby sister has the other one and will probably stick it up her nose. The feeling I'm having here is one of inevitability, of powerlessness in the face of great truths. I might make some "very dramatic black dots" because I am not supposed to judge your finger paintings good or bad, instead what I must do is praise your choice of color, and line length, effort, and eye-hand coordination. If this was Dance Class I might just lie on the floor, expressing myself.

When you use your nice voice to tell me you hate the fish sticks I am making for dinner, I rather hate your nice voice. Do not forage in the fridge for "something else." There is nothing else. Just eat it. We will have Science Time later darlings, I promise, when we look in the toilet bowl after Daddy comes home.

Elizabeth is a stay-at-home mother of two under 5. Before having kids, she worked in corporate and foundation relations, and before that at the Museum of Science, Boston. She moonlights writing in the very early mornings before everyone gets up and wants things. In the little free time she has, Elizabeth makes complicated French patries to tempt her kids into doing what she asks. Her work has appeared in terrain.org, The Delmarva Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Tar River Poetry, and the Baltimore City Paper. Visit her blog: Goody Bastos. Elizabeth can be reached at: elizabeth.bastos@gmail.com.