“Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom.” Wakes me up every day. It’s either the middle of the night or the early morning. My son doesn’t walk into my room, he stands in the doorway and says “mom” from a whisper to a quiet yell. If my son is at his dad’s then my fur-son wakes me up. If I don’t wake up by sensing his moist nose an inch from my face, he sticks his tongue out and licks.
After waking up, I start the prepped coffee pot, and drink my first cup while staring at the ground, watching the carpet move in a psychedelic wave because I have thick sleepy residue coating my eyeballs. If it’s time with my son, we go through the rigamarole of him asking me to watch YouTube and play Fortnite. After he pouts, I seriously ask him, “Do you know me at all?”
Then he sings me songs that would get him suspended from school, and I low-key laugh and tell him he can’t ever say that stuff in public. He tells me to look up stock prices, we look at graphs we don’t really understand, and he tells me all the things he’s going to buy when he’s old. My coffee kicks in and I daydream about giving future interviews on Geoffrey to Biography Channel, “When he was a kid, he loved money and hated loosing games… we actually had to ban them because he flips game boards, cries and breaks things when he gets the sense he’s not in the lead, and his sister runs aways screaming, ‘He’s giving me anxiety!’”
When my dog wakes me up, it’s a quieter journey from sleep-dream into daydream, but after the dog notices my face is unfurled, he’s ready to go on an outdoor adventure, also called the Max Poopfest. He starts his series of bowel unloading at the same spot. I tie that bag off and leave it at the top of the first hill we climb to pick up on the way back. From then on, I leave tied off poop-bags right next to the desecrated spot, to swoop up on the return.
When the dog poops, I stand next to him and look at whatever house we're in front of. Usually the dog is obscured by some hedge planted in the 1970s, and my unanimated face takes in the house like Mike Myers standing in the street. I have yet to see someone in a window looking back at me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the person flips me off and dramatically throws the curtains closed.
On one stretch, the front yards of houses are separated from the road by a foot-wide strip of tiny white rocks. When the dog poops on this, I feel bad because I have to scoop the rocks up in the bag since they are disgusting and shit-covered, but I figure they’d prefer that when I justify their cost of replenishing the stolen property.
The house that starts this stretch is perfectly maintained. One time I left a bag of poop next to the mail box, and kept on running, but before I made it far, the owner was yelling at me that I forgot the dog’s poop bag. This man actually picked up the bag and because I had headphones in and didn’t really know what he was saying, he was throwing a pointed finger to the bag of shit. I yelled, probably very loudly because of the music blasting in my eardrums, “I'm getting the bag on my way back.”
I think the guy felt stupid, and I don’t really blame him, but maybe he has a problem with people leaving tied off bags of dog-doo next to his mailbox. I didn’t get too close to man because my dog’s reaction to anyone who is not within my inner-circle is to assume they are a psychopath trying to kill me. It’s down-right embarrassing, the dog’s unconditional love, but I shrug it off like I’m out with a pre-schooler asking inappropriate questions.
At the top of the second hill is an elderly couple’s house. After our first chat she told me, “You can call me Grandma,” and I politely declined, since I don’t know her at all. Even the dog had issue with this possible-serial-killer-posing-as-a-harmless-old-lady, and he jumped back and forth from her feet, barking incessantly through the entire encounter. She didn’t seem phased, and asked me if she could give him a treat. I told her, “You can try, but he prefers dirty underwear.”
The four mile walk/run/stand my dog and I go through was an everyday occurrence in June because my kids were gone most of the month. My kids went on a trip with their dad the first part, and after they returned we had a nice four day stretch before they went off to my parents’ house to attend a Vacation Bible School. What really sold me on this summer camp was the cost, FREE!
Over the week, I was home with the dog happily working away, picturing the kids crafting, singing and playing games with new friends. My son refused to go the last two days, and spent that time following around my mom (not a surprise). I didn’t understand why he was so against the camp, but it all became clear; the price tag was a trick to sequester children and tell them loads of crazy shit.
The last day of camp ended with a performance for the parents. Now I love Jesus, and Jesus songs (Father Abraham - it’s banger), but I wasn’t familiar with any of these songs. One song was about God’s creation of man and woman. The messaging was clear, there’s just two boxes that can be checked, male or female. My son refused to do the performance and stood cross-armed in the back. I sat in the front row, saved face, nodding my head to the beat and video taping my daughter.
The performance ended with a big barbecue. My sister and her child army were there too, so we claimed a picnic table by throwing all our crap on top of it, and got in the buffet line. When I returned to the table, balancing three plates, there were five other people squeezed onto the table with us. It was uncomfortably tight, but we couldn’t be rude, so I just side whispered to Becky, “What the hell?” And Becky looked at me like, “I know!”
There was a man and woman and their three kids, the youngest one sat right next to me and coughed on my plate the whole time. My son was still getting back at me for sending him to camp so he refused to eat, and scowled at me. The woman picked up the pile of crafts her kids made, and said, it was all heading straight for the trashcan. Becky laughed, and told her, “I do the same thing.” And I looked at Becky like, “You lie! I know you will be scotch taping this shit to your walls upon getting home so you can admire your children’s art.”
The camp leader came over, and I said thanks. I told her, “Were Catholic, but I’ve been thinking of going to the big Christian church in our neighborhood because it has a much more of a fun vibe.” She told me, we’d be better off at the new church because then we’d actually learn scripture. I gave a half-smile and looked into her eyes that gave me the impression she was insane. When I told Becky that I feared the lady in charge of our kids the last five days was coo-coo-bonkers, she said, “Naaaahhh!”
After camp ended, I loaded up the car with the suitcases, and my exhausted mom waved goodbye. We drove up the mountain, and hit a wall of traffic. In the four hours it took to move the wreckage of a semi-truck that crashed and caught on fire, the kids filled me in on all the lessons they learned throughout the week. Luckily, I was able to have this one-on-two time to undo any undoable damage. Hopefully, when they’re in therapy at 40, the remaining will be sorted out.
They told me one of the camp counselors said her parents are Buddhist and it makes her sad to know they are going to hell. My daughter recently got over my brother’s kid telling her that her parents will most likely rot in hell for eternity because of our divorce, so I had to double-down on that conversation, and for the sake of my daughter, I assured her repeatedly, “Your dad is going to heaven.”
Then we got into the musical numbers they performed, and I explained to them that the “God made male, and God made female” song seems to have a relevant social agenda. When I sang, “God made man,” my voice was low and I raised a clenched fist, and when I sang, “God made female,” my voice was high and I flipped my wrist. Kiki understood, sort of. She said, “Ohhhh, it’s racist!” I said, “Sort of, it is like gender-racist because some people don’t want to be called male or female.” And she made sense of it all by saying, “That song is very gender-rude.” I agreed.
The last thing they brought up was evolution. The entire week they were told evolution isn’t real, and given loads of kooky arguments to support the claim. Something about the amount of salt in the ocean was the most compelling argument to the kids. I explained to them my thoughts on the entire evolution debate, “The fact that anyone can be so confident about what the world was like 100 million years ago blows my mind. In either case, it is on such a macro level, evolution has zero affect on the human experience.” I really don’t know where they stand on this, and to my point, I don’t really care.
My son made it clear he didn’t let the messaging seep too deep into his brain, but my daughter will need to revisit this conversation 700 more times. I told them, “You’re better off ridding yourself of religious dogma. It’s sort of like a bag of dog shit you have to carry around with you, and even if you set it down, you still never forget it’s there because someone is going to point at it and yell at you, even if they look really stupid.”
Then, like a stroke of magic, the traffic started to move. I thought about church. I love going to church, it's an hour I think about all the people in my life, but I considered the call-and-responses throughout the hour, and how I've spent a lifetime saying, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you," which is the exact opposite of the self-affirmation I have scotch taped to my bathroom mirror. It reminds me of Helly R in Severance, when she is hooked up to a lie detector and has to say over and over, "I am sorry, and sorry is all I am," until the polygraph shows she is telling the truth.
I started to feel sad, but then I heard the kids laughing. My son moved on from resenting me and started singing one of his songs, lyrical cheap thrills to get us home.
