Full Contact Hide and Seek

"We're going to play a game when we get home," Rissa says, in the midst of our after-dinner  walk.

"Are we?" I query.

"Oh, yeah," she says.

David immediately concurs.

"What kind of game?" I ask.

"Hide and seek? Sardines?" she jokes.

"I could get on board with Hide and Seek," I admit. I haven't played it since Rissa was little and she would hide behind the curtains, giggling so much that the fabric would shake.

David is looking pretty excited, but he manages to tone down a manic grin. "Hide and Seek would be okay," he says nonchalantly.

Once we're home, the three of us stand in the kitchen, ready to get down to it.

"Okay, is it Sardines or Hide and Seek?" Rissa asks.

Me, personally, I never played Sardines. With only three people, I imagine it's not as entertaining as, say, with 6 or more. "I'm feeling more Hide and Seekish," I say.

David rubs his hands together, already getting into the spirit. "Ground rules? Are we using the yard as well?"

"No!" Rissa and I say simultaneously. "Inside only!"

"Agreed." David now resembles Vizzini from The Princess Bride. "Who's it first?"

"I'll be it," I volunteer. "How much time do I have?"

"A minute?" Rissa suggests.

"Sounds good."

"You go outside," David says. "Face away from the house and count out a minute, and we'll hide!" He has turned into a 10-year-old.

I head out to the back yard and start my count. "One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three..." By the time I get to 31, I figure that I've given them way too much time already, so I skip the 'one thousand and' part and just revert to counting double digits out loud. I reach 60 and turn to open the door. "READY OR NOT, HERE I COME!!" I yell. My base age is now about eight.

I look around the main floor. Under the sofa, in the laundry closet, behind the chair and a half in the living room. No sign of anyone. I head upstairs. I peek in the bathroom - no one's in the deep soaker tub. All the while, I'm trying to figure out where I will hide for the next two rounds. I go into Rissa's room. I check the left closet both sides... nobody. I check the right closet, left side... nobody... I open the right side and move some of Rissa's clothes...

"Crap!" says Rissa. "I can't believe you found me so quickly!" She's bummed. 

"I mean, really, there are only so many places that we can hide in this house." I commiserate.

We head to my room and check out the closet and under the bed. No David. We check under Rissa's bed. No David. We head back downstairs and check in the laundry closet again. No David. No David under the kitchen table, or under the sofa or ottoman. He's 6 feet tall, and inflexible - he can't just hide anywhere. We both look at the slanted door that leads to the basement. The gravel-and-dirt-floored-may-as well-be-a-dungeon... basement. With cobwebs and musty humidity. I open the door and see dirt on the basement stairs.

"Oh, for the love of... The basement is disintegrating," I say. I want to close the door immediately so that I don't have to deal with the crumbling "retaining wall" that is shored up by what now looks like the bow of a small dinghy, but originally would have been plumb and square timber. Both the cats flash past me and begin exploring the tiny crawl space under the living room. I trudge down and sweep off the stairs, contemplating how much it will cost to shore up the crumbling foundation-esque parts of the basement. Fuck. So much for wiggle room on the credit line.

I peer behind shelving units. I look up into the crawl space under the kitchen. The mid-summer smell from the basement is pungent. I emit shudder/gag noises as I walk through a particularly wide cobweb.

"Is he down there?" asks Rissa.

"I'm not seeing him." I peer around once more and brush off the dirt on my feet and head back upstairs. We go through the entire house again, not finding him. When we start positing that he might be in the dishwasher, I realize that I may have to OLLY OLLY OXEN FREE his ass. 

My innate competitiveness does not want give up yet. I'll have to check out the basement again. I open the door. David is standing at the bottom of the stairs - grinning madly.

"Where were you?" Rissa and I ask.

"Under the living room," he says smugly, brushing dirt off his body. 

"Of course you were." But then I smile. "On the upside, you're the one who put the dirt all over the stairs, so I don't have to worry about fixing the foundation."

"True." He's fairly dancing with superiority at this point. 

"Okay, you're it now," I say. I'll show him. I'm going to hide someplace so unexpected, that he will NEVER find me. "Give us a couple of minutes."

He heads outside. Rissa runs upstairs and I look at the corner kitchen table. With the table cloth for coverage, if I were to bend myself around the corner bench, I could be pretty hidden. But I have only two minutes. Now, what I should do is move the table out of the way, situate myself in the corner and then pull the table back over me. What I do instead, is attempt to get my 53-year-old ass between the table and the bench - which doesn't fit. I am now wedged between the bench and the table edge and I can't move forward and I can't move backwards. 

I try to use my shoulder to heft the table to give myself some extra space to maneuver, but it's just too heavy to move with one shoulder. I have zero leverage. I kick out. One of the chairs hits the floor. He'll know that I'm there if he sees the chair. He's going to find me immediately. I try to edge towards the corner but my linebacker shoulders are way too big for the space I'm in. I'm trapped. I'm trapped, and time is running out. I start to hyperventilate. Three seconds later my hyperventilation is morphing into something much more panic-driven.

"Help!" I yell. "I'm trapped! HELP!"

"I'm coming!" Rissa yells. 

"HELP ME!!" Logically, I know that I'm not going to die trying to hide myself on the corner bench under our kitchen table, at least not in the time it will take to be un-wedged, but my flight or fight response does not know that. 

"HELP!!"

"Okay! It's okay!" Rissa is racing down the stairs to me. She tries to move the table that remains wedged on my hips and shoulders.

"OW!! OW!!" 

"Sorry!"

By now, David has heard my shrieks of terror and he yanks open the door. "What's happening?"

"I'm TRAPPED!!!"

"Oh." I can picture him trying to work out the geometry of the situation.

"TRAPPED!!" 

He too, tries to pull the table off of me.

"LIFT IT! LIIIIIIIIIIIFT IT!!"

"It's okay, it's okay!!!"

They lift the table and I manage to scramble to safety. In the aftermath of my near-death experience, I am laughing in near hysteria. David and Rissa are just regular laughing. At me. As I rightly deserve. 

Before we finish our three rounds of Hide and Seek, I have bruised most of my right side from my first failed hiding attempt, wet my ass from lying in the soaker tub and put my neck out trying to hide behind the living room curtains. David has scraped his body scrambling into the crawl space under the living room before almost suffocating under forgotten pants in the bottom of our closet. Rissa, a Hide and Seek champion, hid in her closet in relative comfort both hiding rounds, blanketed by her purple terry bathrobe. 

On the upside, the 1/2 hour game provided a full cardio workout for both David and me. Yes, our heart rates were raised mostly in terror and we required nightcaps to calm ourselves down afterwards, but I'm still calling it exercise.

Middle-aged crazy woman

"MOTHERFUCKER!" I exclaim vehemently (and quietly - because I'm in the backyard and our adjacent neighbours have kids and I don't want them to start randomly yelling MOTHERFUCKER, and then attributing it to the middle-aged, crazy woman whose backyard abuts theirs.)

"What?" asks David, looking up from his computer programming on the outdoor sofa

"This," I say, pronouncing the syllable with vitriol, "is not big enough." 

I brandish a white metal cylinder - with lid - that I purchased at Dollarama. It was going to be my "Bug spray and firepit lighter" cylinder. But the fucker is NOT. TALL. ENOUGH. The top will not close. The top isn't even close to closing. My $3.00 purchase that, a half hour before, had produced a gleeful, money-saving grin, is now the wrong size and I am obviously a moron for having purchased it!!

"You are not a moron," says David.

"Did I just say all of that out loud?" I ask.

He gives me an Aardman Animation grin with a side of shoulder shrug.

"Why don't you get yourself a drink and come out and sit in the fresh air?" he suggests. "I'll grab the smaller bug spray that will fit in this lovely new hiding container."

I stomp back inside and prepare to make myself a Caesar with the litre of Clamato that I just purchased from Dollarama along with the aforementioned failed container. I've never made a Caesar before. I'm pretty sure that there's Clamato and vodka. Which, thank the Gods, I have. I can finish off the bottle of vodka... in the freezer so that I don't have to open the new one... I open the freezer door. MOTHERFUCKER!! We already finished that vodka. When? When did we finish it? How much vodka have we been drinking? I dig into my internal calendar and think about the vodka... MOSCOW MULES! David made Moscow Mules the other night and he pours heavy. That's why the old bottle is finished.

Well, that, and the fact that we've been drinking like fishes since the beginning of the pandemic. About 6 weeks ago, I decided that I would no longer drink on weekdays because the whole "nightcap" situation was getting out of hand. This week I fell off my Radio Flyer wagon. This week I lost my mind. I've been weepy. I've been irrationally angry. I've French-kissed the depths of despair in the back of a Plymouth Duster. If I was still having my period, I would say that I have PMS, but I'm in menopause now and the lifter hills and inclined dive loops of that particular roller coaster have mostly levelled out for me.

Except for this week. This week, I have failed at EVERY. FUCKING. THING. Except for over-dramatization and hyperbole. 

I've been doing a lot of shoulders back and deep breathing this week. I've been compartmentalizing impending panic attacks. I put them way, way back... in the back of my bedroom closet, behind the filing box of old correspondence, behind the superfluous Christmas pillows, behind the clothes rail, behind the curtain, past the bed, behind the bedroom door, past the "loft space," up the stairs from the kitchen... deeeeep into my cranium, where they stop me from hyperventilating most of the time.

I went for a walk today, and when I got home, I wasn't sure where I had walked. I'd walked myself into a state of hypnosis or early onset dementia. Did I walk across the bridge? I'm not sure. Did I see people on the boardwalk? Was I even ON the boardwalk? Yes, I must have been, because I walked past the West Beach. Didn't I?

Now, to be fair, I was using my wireless ear buds for the very first time today, whilst listening to Marc Maron's WTF, so I was definitely distracted by his interview with Tom Jones - which I highly recommend. Maybe that's all it was. That's why I can't remember 25 minutes of my walking route. I know where I started and I remember different points along the way, and, given that there are only a few alternatives to get from Point A to Point B, I must have taken one of them, which would definitely have me walking along the boardwalk. 

And maybe, just maybe, my freaking out should be completely expected given that the mental exhaustion of living through a pandemic takes its toll on everyone. Even those of us who are fortunate enough to love our spouses and children, and love spending extra time with them... But all I really want is to be able to have play dates with people other than them now. I want to hug a person I haven't had sex with or given birth to. (I should have maybe phrased that with more specificity.) That's what it comes down to. And for some reason, this week, on the cusp of returning normalcy in Ontario, all my compartmentalizing has caught up with me. 

Which means it's time for that drink... and perhaps instead of meeting any number of self-defined deadlines - a finished chapter, a completed outline or brand new song lyrics - I just drink that fucking drink and sit back with a Regency Romance with a side of historical smut for the added endorphin rush. Then, tomorrow, I can reboot. Because if life, right now, still isn't normal? Why should I expect to be?

Ménage à Moi Miscommunication

I have been married for almost 23 years. Of those almost 23 years, 22.852 of them have been unreservedly, unabashedly, unquestionably happy. Relationships cannot possibly be all sunshine and roses all of the time. Once you've said your "I do's", you do not forever exist in a state of "Happily Ever After," no matter how fucking close you might come.  In spite of what observers might think, David and I, after almost 23 years of mostly wedded bliss, still come up against unexpected conflict.

Witness: Last night David and I were both reading in the living room. I got in into my head that I wanted to have some sexy time once we reached the bedroom. Given that David had just finished a LOOONG week of teaching virtual high school to disaffected teenagers, I reckoned that he might not be up for a full on bouncy-bouncy adventure, so I threw him a soft-ball.

"When we go upstairs," I said, in my most seductive tone, "I'm going to have a ménage à moi -  FOR YOU."

When I said "FOR YOU," I meant that I was going to give more than the ol' college try. I was going to make the whole situation a feast for his senses - visual, auditory, tactile, smell... what's the fifth one? TASTE!! I could have put some taste in there as well, if I'd been specific about how he could become involved. I anticipated that, shortly after the show began, his mental exhaustion would be circumvented by a visceral bodily response. However, outside of my own head, I did not specify my expectations for the main event. 

So... when I clad myself in a low-cut, figure forming, above-the-knee nightie (sans granny panties), and grabbed my... Magic Scepter, I anticipated that David would, if not immediately, then very soon after, become ENGAGED in the afore-mentioned enterprise, and would add a hand, to help a girl out, as it were. 

David didn't get the memo. And although he did have his left hand on my knee, as a warm reminder of  another person in the bed, his other hand held his phone, whereupon he was reading his latest Sci-Fi novel. This, I noticed, in the midst of the MAIN EVENT. Which, when I noticed, made it a bit more difficult for me to... land a punch. And when I finally did win on a TKO, I immediately burst into tears, on account of the fact that he'd been reading his book during, what was supposed to have been (if only in my own brain), a seduction of the senses... FOR HIM.

In our wedding vows we promised to talk to each other, especially when it was difficult. We also promised to listen to each other, especially when it was difficult. 

And as much as I knew that it would be painful to tell him that... orbiting Venus... beside him as he read - on his phone - made me feel like shit, I knew that I had to, or we'd run into this issue again. So I laid it all out there. And when we talked, he told me that he'd thought that I'd wanted 'alone' time, which meant, to him, that he shouldn't really be involved,  when, what I wanted more than anything? Was to have him INvolved. 

He abjectly apologized. I abjectly apologized. And then I promised that, from now on, I would let him in on any and all plans for self-pleasure, because even after almost 23 years, no matter how much I might want him to? He still can't read my mind. 

So next time, I'm just gonna say, "Hey there handsome! I'm heading upstairs to play some... pelvic guitar, how'd you like to accompany me with some chest harmonica?"

ALL THE BAD WORDS

WARNING: There are bad words in this post.

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"SHIT, PISS, FUCK, MOTHER FUCKER!!!" I yell, nausea washing over me. 

I have spent the last 60 minutes painstakingly placing, pinning, and subsequently sewing together the edges of outdoor fabric to a recycled zipper only to  just now discover that the ends of the zipper do not match up. By about three inches. How the fuck is that even possible? Zippers have two sides that are of equal FUCKING length!! While I angrily attempt to close the zipper, the zipper pull... comes off in my hand. I broke the zipper. The zipper pull in my hand mocks me mercilessly. I storm down the stairs in a fit of failure.

David, who has heard my barbaric YAWP, is prepared. "Hey, love," he commiserates, his voice soft and supporting, without even knowing yet why he is offering his spousal commiseration. 

"I GIVE UP!!" I yowl, flopping down on the living room floor, desperately trying to ground myself as I drag my fingers through the carpet fibers.

"What happened?" he asks, propping himself over me, availing himself of an unexpected arm workout in this endeavor.

"THE ZIPPER DOESN"T MATCH UP!!" I wail.

"The zipper?" he queries.

"THE FUCKING ZIPPER DOESN'T MATCH UP!!!" I let out a bark of near-hysterical laughter, as I jam the heels of my hands into my eye sockets. "The zipper, which I have spent FOREVER lining up doesn't match, which is fucking impossible, because it's a ZIPPER with two equally matched sides  AND..." This is where I begin to cackle maniacally... "I yanked the zipper pull off!! I YANKED IT OFF OF THE FUCKING ZIPPER!!!" I show him the zipper pull. "It won't go back on!!!"

"Oh," says David, still braced in a plank above me. "That sounds bad."

"Yeah," I say. "I've spent 4 hours so far seam ripping the old cushions, cutting new fabric and sewing Turkish corners!! I should have just bought new cushions."

We purchased our outdoor sofa in 2008. 13 years on, to save a buck or 800, I decide that I will sew new covers for the existing cushions. Did you know that good outdoor sofa cushions - JUST THE CUSHIONS - cost as much as an actual fucking sofa?!? I mean, for the price of purchasing brand new cushions for our existing outdoor sofa, I could buy a brand new loveseat and two chairs WITH their cushions!

Defiantly waging war against consumerism, I purchased bright red discount outdoor fabric last fall in preparation for recovering the cushions. It costs me a quarter of the price of brand new cushions. Over the past week I have begun my adventures in reupholstering. 

I'm not an upholstery virgin, I have "box cushioned" a 1/2 dozen times since I've owned grown up furniture. I have the old piping, the old cushion covers and the old zippers. No actual instructions for these particular covers which aren't technically box cushions, but I'm sure that my dormant sewing intuition will soon kick into high gear.

I am lucid enough to recognize that I might need to refresh my skill set. I watch some quick and dirty YouTube videos on "Turkish Cushions," "Piping for seat cushions," "Zippers for seat cushions." I extrapolate, I bob, I weave... I feel almost confident about possible outcomes. Turns out that wrestling with a 36" zipper while herding extra stiff outdoor fabric through a non-commercial sewing machine is not my forte. Hence my vitriolic outburst.

David walks me up the stairs and offers an extra set of problem-solving eyes as we face the fallout from my valiant first effort. Having him there alleviates my urge to take all the fabric and cushions and throw them out the window while speaking in tongues. By some miracle, I manage to get the zipper pull back onto the zipper. That there? A big fucking win for me. After a quarter of an hour, it seems like I've managed to figure out a path forward which involves me ripping out the stitching for half of the zipper and refolding my Turkish corners. I no longer want to sob uncontrollably. 

"You okay?" David asks.

"Y... eah... I think so."

"Do you need a beverage of some sort?"

"Yes please."

"Whiskey?"

"Yes please. TALL."

I re-tuck, I re-pin, I re-sew. It looks mostly like it should. I stuff the old cushion into the new cover and notice that the fit is... if I'm using my indoor voice, imprecise.  For it to look good, I will have to rip out the front piping... again. My face scrunches up. My inner banshee demands to be free. I force my shoulders down. I take a calming breath. And another. I eschew foul language. 

I walk calmly downstairs and message a friend who sews for the theatre. I offer her heaps of money to finish the project. She hasn't responded yet. But if she doesn't, I'm going to donate the rest of the material to our local theatre and I am buying some fucking replacement cushions. Life is too fucking short. I don't want "Death by sewing aneurysm" in my obituary.

I've ordered HOW much from Amazon?!?

As a grown-ass woman paying down a mortgage/credit line/supporting a child in university, I've managed to curb non-essential spending by online window shopping and pinning the fuck out of colourful things on Pinterest; thereby racking up my virtual endorphins rather than my Visa statement.

I have evolved in the past 30 years. I have learned to differentiate between want vs need and no longer go shopping as an activity to alleviate boredom. I shop because I need to replace winter boots, or my exercise leggings no longer have material on their inner thighs or I need to dye my hair.

Since April of last year, I have placed 121 Amazon orders. ONE. HUNDRED. AND. TWENTY. FUCKING. ONE.  Even if I eliminate maybe 24 of those for friend/family birthdays, Christmas and baby shower gifts, that is still 97 online orders! That's 8.08 orders a month. That's 1.86 orders a week!! I have ordered MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK from Amazon FOR THE PAST YEAR! 

HOLY FUCK. 

And yeah, we're still in the midst of a pandemic and yeah, maybe  a dozen times, I returned an item because it wasn't the right size/colour/it didn't feel/look/sound right. So that might take me down to  85 orders. But that is still 1.61 times a week! What the fuck have I been buying?!? 

FACE MASKS - because putting clay on one's face forces one to sit still for at least 15 minutes and not focus on the news.

POSTURE-CORRECTING BRASSIERS - because I'm looking more and more like Quasimodo with all my time at the computer.

CURLING IRONS - (plural) - because even if I'm not going out in public, there is the odd day when I want to look like I give a damn - even just for me - CAN I NOT LOOK GOOD JUST FOR ME?? - and random hanks of bone straight hair amidst the rest of the curly locks make me look crazy (er).

LOW-CALORIE, GLUTEN-FREE STARCH OPTIONS - because despite 45 - 60 minutes of cardio every single fucking day, my menopausal body does not process food the way it once did and my waist defiantly remains (grabs measuring tape to confirm)... 36 fucking inches!! I have to find a healthy way to lose "very bad visceral body fat encasing my organs" or at least that's what my GP says. "Middle-aged women with waists over 35 inches are at risk for early death due to heart disease, stroke, Type 2 Diabetes..." Which, if I wasn't already hi-key panicked about dying from Covid-19 complications due years of ignorant chemical use as a Molly Maid while in university (I can say with complete confidence that I never read a single label on a single cleaning product before I was at least 25 years of age), this whole waist-to-hip ratio thing is making me anxious as fuck. So we're taking steps to avoid that.

MAGIC WAND 'personal massager' -  because David became worried when my previous one started to smoke.

BEDDING - lots and lots and LOTS of bedding. Because we weren't able to spend Christmas with any of our family, and I got it in my head that festive Christmas bedding would make it all easier. And patterned flannel sheets would obviously alleviate angst too. And then, having new white sheets for everyone's bed just made sense, because we hadn't purchased new sheets in about a decade and the previous sheets were looking like they'd been through trauma. And really? Even with all those 'coping' purchases? I spent less than what many folks would spend at Bed, Bath & Beyond on a single set of 400 ct. Queen Sized sheets. Or at least that's what I realized when a friend told me what he'd spent on sheets.

DVDs - because we have evidently reached the end of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crave and whatever other media apps we've signed up for during the pandemic. 

BODY LOTIONS - nice smelling, luxurious, infused with fucking essential oils - because anything, and I mean ANYTHING that gets me to calm the fuck down and not obsess and over-empathize with the state of the world is a good thing.

If I could buy edible cannabis products from Amazon, I'm sure I'd be doing that too. And yes, I just checked, and other than some gummies with cbd oil - I'm out of luck there... WAIT!! I'm such light weight, that might be exactly what the Heather ordered.

A fuck of a lot of money was spent through Amazon in the last year. But I'm not sure that it was any more than what we would have spent if we'd had a vacation anywhere. Or done regular summer day trip shit. Or spent a long weekend in New York and binged on plays.

We're all fucking coping. As best we can. And right now? My coping comes from pink clay masks, my new (4 speed) personal massager and new sheets. When I can hug all my people again? I won't need substitute comfort. My endorphin rush will come from actual physical contact. And that? Will be fucking awesome. 

p.s. Our family's position of gainful employment with PAID sick days makes us so fucking fortunate. We have greater freedom and security than many others during this time. I can write a post feigning shock related to over-spending when others don't have that outlet. It's up to families like ours to give more to charities, help our friends, families and neighbours, support small businesses and independent restaurants because, right now, we can.