Nothing funny happened this month.
Unless you count the morning that I couldn’t heat my tea, because there were three kegs between me and the microwave. If you’ve seen me staggering around in the mornings before I’ve moved on to my second cup of darker-than-coffee tea, you’ll know this wasn’t funny. But what could I do but laugh (in retrospect)?
Or unless you count the fact that it has come to light that the Little Man has been faking his way through choir for the past two months—going through more effort to pretend he knows the words than it would have taken him to learn the words—so he had to memorize the entire Christmas concert in one week. Brow-beating your child into learning the words to Joy to the World? Ironic, if not funny. “You have fifteen minutes to go downstairs and learn all of the verses. NOW! Without any more whining! And if you come back upstairs without having learned them, no dessert!” Ludicrous. You could never have predicted the things that emerge from your mouth since becoming a parent.
Or unless you count the Man I Married deciding that the Little Man was mispronouncing all of the words to the Spanish verse of Oh Christmas Tree, so he subsequently supervised the practice session(s) of O Arbol de Navidad. The Man I Married—an Ohio boy who still doesn’t get the English language right—enthusiastically slaughtered the Spanish language on our two trips to Mexico, much to the delight of the Mexicans, because at least he was trying to speak their language instead of expecting them to speak ours, and he was so awfully sincere and cheerful about it. From behind the closed bedroom door I heard a high voice warbling, “El ar-ree-oh-bord-uh dee Nah-bee-dahd,” followed by a deep bass thundering, “It’s El Ahr” (pirate-y) “Bowl dee Na-Vee-Dad” (rhymes with Badly Dad). Then a high voice arguing. Then a deep bass thundering about how a ten-year-old should not be arguing with a fifty-year-old about how to pronounce Spanish. They were both wrong, but I decided against poking my head in to offer up the correct way to pronounce Navidad.
Or unless you count my having coughed my way through the entire month, but the Man I Married, mercifully, slept through all of it. After a five-hour long coughing fit one night I asked him, “Did I keep you awake last night?” “No, why?” he answered. The following morning, after a relatively good night, he greeted me with, “Good news! I actually heard you coughing last night!” Which translated as, “I noticed you were suffering; aren’t I a considerate spouse?” Since he brings me my tea in the morning, I must dutifully answer in the affirmative.
Or unless you count Thanksgiving dinner, when members of my family went into a graphic explanation of polynidal cysts (think twice before looking it up). The anecdote included a detailed description of how a nurse in the exam room passed out upon…er…the sudden olfactory unpleasantness of my cousin’s cyst. The story was followed by the offer to display the heinous scars left by the removal of what turned out to be my cousin’s four cysts lodged at the base of his spine in the “gluteal cleft” (“one the size of a pool ball and three the size of ping pong balls”), with a double check first by his wife on how much of his butt we might have to view in order to see the scars (too much, apparently, since we thankfully were not rewarded with the threatened display). This conversation was followed by my aunt hiking up her shirt and removing her back brace so that my sis-in-law (a nurse-in-training) could remove a stitch or piece of skin from my aunt’s surgical incision site that wasn’t healing right and was bothering her. My sis-in-law held out the piece of removed body part to show me. Such matter of fact statements as, “Pus does not bother me” were uttered. Pie, anyone? I for one was snorting sangria out of my nose during this very unfunny banter. There is never such a thing as a “lull in the conversation” with my family.
Or that on the drive home from Thanksgiving dinner, I said to the Little Man that the thing I was most thankful for was that he was in my life. To which he responded that the thing he was most thankful for was that Buster Posey won the MVP for the World Series and that he got to see him hit three home runs in one game. Which is as it should be for a ten-year-old, who shouldn’t have to feel thankful for things like a family. That’s for weepy moms who had a little too much sangria and who kept grabbing the dashboard and yelping to the Man I Married, “Slow down!” He replied, “I’m going 48 miles-per-hour on the freeway.”
Or that, although the dog leaves her tidy little turds in the exact same place on the carpet every night when she decides it’s far too wet and cold to do her business outside, the Man I Married never looks there first before walking across it. And he never notices that he’s done it until he’s made several circuits of the entire house, tracking it everywhere. Which turns a quick and easy cleanup job into a…not so easy cleanup job. But, hey, it gets us to clean the house.
So, really, nothing very funny happened this month. If things don’t pick up around here, we might have to break down and buy a television so that we can pipe in a laugh track now and then.
And now I leave you with this traditional German Christmas tune to herald in our politically correct holiday season:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oirrPQKn9t4
The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle Edition at Amazon
12.5 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.
Straight-no-Chaser Mom 