As some of you may know, I don't typically get a long right away with most breeders {and by this, I do not mean straight people, I mean people who have birthed/adopted/taken in small, adolescent humans, and become their parents. You can be gay or straight, if you got the bebes, you are a breeder}.
Maybe we don't instantly jive most of the time because I'm almost always significantly younger than the other parents of kids Lainie's age and I feel like they're judging me, maybe it's because I refer to them as breeders...the reason isn't important.
The point is, I really have never felt comfortable around most people with kids.
I'm not a PTA mom, I don't run the local girl scout troop, I used to drive a mini-van but I mostly used it to bump rap music and drink in when I was hiding from my kids, and I have not ever in my life successfully baked something from scratch.
I don't live for sales at Michael's, I look ugly in sweater sets, I have tattoos and I went through a legit slutty phase when I was 19.
Most of the time when I'm around other parents with kids my daughter's age, I feel like a hooker in church, sitting in their well decorated dining rooms just sweating cuss words, holding in the F word like a fart on the first date.
I feel them looking at my wrist tattoo, and see them doing the math in their head when they finally do break down and just ask how fucking old I am.
It's not pleasant.
I admit, I probably have a lot of preconceived notions about most parental types.
I probably assume that they're all stay at home moms who are completely obsessed with their kids to the point that they talk about their 4 year old's "love languages" as if they really know what it is - like I imagine them sitting at their computer at night taking that fucking love language quiz {which I've totally taken for myself, and that shit is LEGIT. Words of affirmation and quality time, right here y'all} for their child, like PRETENDING to be their 4 year old when they answer the questions, just to see what it is, as if toddlers have any goddamn idea what words of affirmation or acts of service are.
I also - based on some straight up shitty experiences with breeders from the 'burbs - assume that they're all judgmental and closed minded, etc.
I know these snap judgments aren't fair, and as I get older and age and loss continues to mellow me, I occasionally think that I should do the adult thing once a decade, and branch out. Give one of these highly stereotypical matriarch figures a chance. Who knows? Maybe I'll make a new friend!
That kind of crack pot thinking is exactly how I ended up in my neighbor's {who I had just met that. fucking. day.} garage the other night being forcefully baptized while drinking a beer.
My advice to you is also to stay away from beer. It makes you seem too laid back about things. Keep it pretentious and stick to expensive Bourbon, and then people remain too afraid to anoint you without permission.
It all started with us moving into this new neighborhood. See, in our last hood, there were a couple houses across the street just chalk full of kids around my kids' ages, who were always available for playing outside. It was awesome, I hardly ever had to deal with my own children during daylight hours, so long as no one fought with anyone else or god forbid wanted a drink that didn't come from the garden hose.
But then we moved here, and it's mostly old people. Everyone is very friendly though, and one nice, breezy, Thursday morning, the 18 millionth neighbor came into my driveway uninvited while the kids and I were outside caterpillar hunting, to let me know that we just HAD to go over and meet Aubrey, the only other kid in the entire neighborhood, who lives across the street and two houses down.
I was in the same yoga pants I'd worn all week and a ratty t-shirt that I wear to bed/everywhere that no one is likely to see me, so I waited in the driveway with Tiny the caterpillar while Jack and Lainie went to meet their new friend.
I should have known something was amiss when I heard the little girl's mom screaming from across the street in glee about there FINALLY being kids on the block.
I should have gone inside or pretended not to speak english, when the same mom came tromping across the street roughly at the speed of fucking light, to introduce herself to me.
I should have called the whole goddamn thing off and moved to Texas, when she asked for my phone number withing 2 minutes of meeting, all so our kids could play in my yard together.
And I should have just ended it with a toaster in the bathtub, when she called my cell five minutes after we'd spent 20 minutes talking in my yard, to invite me over right. then. to see the inside of her house and get to know each other, so we could decide if we were comfortable with our kids playing together in each other's houses.
But I didn't.
I love my kids somehow more than I hate most parental figures, and wanted her to have a little friend.
So across the street I went.
I toured her home, heard her life story, got the 411 on her love for Jesus, and then it was apparently time for me to ask her questions.
We stood in her garage/art studio, and I assumed the interview was over. I was mentally already crossing the street and opening a beer in my kitchen to recover from this emotional trauma whilst watching Grey's, when she looked at me with her big excited eyes and said "Don't you want to ask me anything?"
I hesitated.
I hadn't so far got the sense she was a child molester or drug addict. No red flags about her possibly whipping my kids behind my back with metal hangers had so far gone up. Her house was very clean, she never cursed, and they had a turtle.
What was I supposed to ask?
"Do you like wine?"
That was all I could think of, in part because having a fucking drink was at that point all. I could. think of. and partly because I'm probably a shallow person and a person's taste in alcohol tells me a lot about them.
For instance, unless they're a recovering alcoholic, I don't trust people who don't drink at all. But I also don't trust voluntarily bald white men, and people who collect stickers, so maybe that's a story for another day.
I digress.
She in fact did love wine, and upon my mentioning it, decided I just HAD to come back over around 7 that night, and sit out in her front yard with her and her husband to watch the kids play and "crack a bottle" of wine.
I'm from the hood, and in the hood you pop a bottle you plan to drink and you crack a bottle you plan to shiv someone with, so admittedly I may have had a misguided idea of what we'd be doing that night when I accepted her invitation.
I also felt intimidated by her and kept side eyeing my daughter playing with her daughter, and felt all of Lainie's hopes and dreams and need for a best friend pull on my painfully sober heart strings.
Fast forward to sometimes around 10:30 pm and a bottle and a half of wine {drank solely by this lady, I had beer} later, and we're dancing her garage to MoTown on Pandora. Well, she's dancing. I'm standing near the door holding my beer and trying to decide if she will buy it if I just leave without saying anything and later blame it on being drunk. I count the empty beer bottles on the porch. Two. That makes three if you count the one in my hand.
I can't even pretend to be that drunk on three beers, because I have a thug ass reputation to uphoald.
I stay.
She, however, is falling into drafting tables and openly weeping while she proclaims her love for Jesus.
This is all OK with me right now because I have a good buzz on and I love watching drunk girls cry, but the next thing I know, the song "Royals" by Lorde comes on, and apparently this shit has some deep spiritual meaning for home girl, because she has me by the elbow like a crabby third grade teacher, and is dragging me into the center of the room before I know what's hit me.
I think at first we're just dancing, so I hold my beer up high to prevent her flailing her own drunk face into the glass bottle, and do my most half hearted dancing ever.
She's now in full on Jesus mode, and is praying out loud - louder and faster, until she is straight up speaking in tongues.
I'm trying not to look too freaked out because I know that one way to escape a serial killer is to not seem shocked by anything that do, so I stay real fucking calm.
But, things continue to escalate, until she dips her thumb into her red wine glass, and I shit you not, draws a cross on my mother fucking forehead with wine.
The wine she's been slurping and crying into all goddamn night, with her dirty ass thumb.
It was worse than an old lady licking a napkin and wiping your damn face.
Frozen in horror, she saw a window and she took it:
Home girl grabs my head - hard and with both fucking hands - and starts rocking back and forth chanting and speaking in tongues like those old, fat, pink skinned TV evangelists, or southern Baptists preachers from the movies.
I'm more or less trapped BY THE FUCKING HEAD in her death grip bear paws, so I decide to just stay calm, roll with it, and finish my beer.
I assimilate very quickly to straight up ridiculous situations as a way of surviving.
So, there I am standing in a stranger's garage at nearly midnight, being forcefully baptized while I drink a beer and fish around in my bra for my last cigarette.
I'm not 100% on how baptisms are supposed to go, but I'm pretty sure neither the baptizer or the baptizee are supposed to be drunk, smoking, or standing in a garage listening to a TuPac Pandora station.
After she finally released my head, I was pulled inside so she could joyfully announce to her husband that she had anointed me, and the holy spirit was going to now move through me.
Expecting him to be more rational, in part because he was sober, and in part because I assumed someone in the house had to be fucking sane, given how much of their dishes actually matched, I figured he would roll his eyes, apologize to me under his breath and put Captain Wine Pants to bed.
Nope.
He looked at her with the straightest face I have ever seen and said
"If you're going to anoint her you should get the real oil"
When I am in a stranger's house and I have already been physically assaulted, the mention of oil of any fucking kind is the fastest way to make me not want to be such a good sport about it all anymore.
I'm ready to leave.
But, of course, since she moves with the speed of the holy spirit, she is back with a bottle of White Angelica essential oil, and blocking the door before I can sin my way through it.
So, now here I am standing in a stranger's kitchen feeling completely convinced that I'm about to made into a skin lamp shade, taking in the all new sensation of someone dumping - I mean literally POURING - the most offensive smelling oil all. over. my. head.
She didn't just make a cross on my forehead, no I'm too full of sin for that to be enough, no she straight up poured it all along my hair line, down the part of my hair, she rubbed in my wrists, on my neck, and BEHIND MY FUCKING EARS so I would never be able to completely wash off what had happened to me.
At midnight I finally left, depressingly sober, out of beer, and stinking like Jesus candles and carnations.
I'm not sure if these things happen to me because I make snap judgments about people, or because every once in a while I try to give people a chance to prove me wrong, but I do now know one thing for sure:
I've now been baptized four fucking times, and not one of them has stuck.
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