I saw a deodorant commercial. This is a multipurpose deodorant, I learned as the lady talked about her “crotch smell.” When she said crotch I nearly fell off the sofa. Then I did fall off the sofa when she followed that up with instructions. She said, “Rub some deodorant cream between your fingers and apply in your butt crack.”
She made a sweeping motion with her fingers as if applying the cream to an invisible butt crack. I looked at my daughter who seemed unfazed, and said, “What the hell has civilization come to?”
She listens to music that breaks my heart, not because it is touching but because it can be so vitriolic and self-critical. I hear her repeating lyrics that sound like, “A-B-C-D-E - Eat shit, fuck you and your dog… your mom’s crotch smells like shit.” Something along those lines. Whenever I hear her unconsciously singing lyrics of this sort, I blast Cat Stevens through the house, to replace the messaging.
I saw the deodorant at Target. A man was standing in front of the shelf examining the different scents. I imagined he was buying it for his girlfriend, and then he handed her this offering, “Oh babe, I was at Target and I picked you up some crotch deodorant.”
That guy is probably dead somewhere.
My older sister is a nurse and she told me that wearing yoga pants all the time will cause vaginosis. Vaginosis is the medical term for crotch smell. Would the word swap have elevated the commercial? I’m not sure.
I’m wearing fewer yoga pants lately because I canceled my hot yoga membership. It's surprising because I was talking about yoga like the middle-aged-California-gal I am. I’ll miss the meditative benefits of yoga, but to be honest, I feel ridiculous chanting in a room full of women with Botox foreheads, collagen lips, and three-hundred-dollar Lululemon outfits.
The yoga studio times didn’t fit into my schedule so I am back to the regular old gym. I forgot how chugging a Red Bull and running six miles is just as effective at clearing my mind. So now I am working out around a bunch of people with earbuds instead of being surrounded by people who attribute their mediocre existence to the superpowers of crystals. I get it; it’s hope, and sometimes you want a tiny rock to solve all your problems.
Last week I woke up at 3 am and scared the shit out of myself thinking that a ghost could, at any moment, touch my foot that was sticking out from the cover. This made me then pull my foot back into the comforter, feeling safe from that potential ghost-touch, but it’s hot August nights, and having my entire body baking under a down comforter is not sustainable, so I’d have to stick my foot back out, then starting up the escalation of dread again.
While I work around the house, I play TV shows in the background. I like to watch investigative reporting on UFOs, Big Foot, time travel, psychics, and ghosts. I hit the ghost stories a little too hard. This indulgence keeps me from criticizing people who love to binge Fox News or CNN because I binge the equivalent of The National Enquirer.
So as I lay awake scared that a finger was going to poke me through the thin veil, I pulled out all the Catholic stops to prevent this from happening. Asking my angels to protect me and praying to the saints to keep anything scary away. My cat doesn’t help the situation, as she looks like she could be in cahoots with an alternate dimension. See picture below.
My daughter is turning 13 this year and she started her classes for confirmation. Confirmation in Catholicism is like a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, it is the ceremony when you become an adult. The church does not make the process easy. She has to attend classes twice a month for two years and do various volunteer and service projects.
Keeping religion active in my kids’s lives is hard as a divorced person because they get to indulge in this notion of choice. My daughter said to me, “Dad said I should be allowed to choose my religion and if I don’t want to be confirmed, I don’t have to.”
I responded with, “That is what someone who doesn’t have a religion says.” But I really wanted to say, “He ought to go to church... it just might be that sad-boy cure."
She said, “I will do it because it is a family tradition.”
My son needed to be convinced with the insight that there would be a bounty of monetary gifts from the family after the ceremony. I did feel bad having to use this tactic, but he is not as “spiritual” as my daughter, and I don’t think he would lean into anything I had to tell him other than that.
I told them, “You will go through periods when you might not believe in God, and thats okay because you will always have this for when you have a moment where you can’t deny that God exists.”
On a smaller scale, the institution of family will do the same. There will be a time, not too far off probably, when my kids will think their parents made terrible decisions, and they’ll resent us. But, they grow through that, and the ego that ballooned with the onset of “freedom” starts to deflate, and they learn to be empathic, eventually towards their parents and the choices they made.
The other day talking to my mom, I realized she is my best friend. I don’t know how it happened but I am so much like my mom it is bizarre. I ended up being a teacher, like my mom, and this was never on my radar as a kid. I’m a writer, and my mom spent a decade working as a children’s book author. And, we both can get spooked in the night to heart-attack-inducing levels.
After I told my mom about being up all night, scared half to death there was a ghost waiting for an invitation at 2 am to chitchat, she said, “I hate it when I scare myself in the middle of the night. That’s why I sleep with an eight-inch screwdriver under my pillow.”
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll accidentally kill Dad?” I asked. She confidently replied, “No.”
It’s a good thing my dad is smart enough not to buy my mom deodorant… of any kind.
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