Are You Kidding Me?!: Chronicles of an Ordinary Life
Are You Kidding Me?!: Chronicles of an Ordinary Life
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Overview
For the first time, bestselling novelist, columnist, and humorist Lesley Crewe's finest newspaper columns are collected in one place.
Not merely razor sharp, Lesley's wit is also ocean wide, taking in everything from the humiliations of breast pumping to the indignities of aging, from the frantic excess of holiday preparations to the homey irritations of a long marriage.
As precise in her observations as Jane Austen and as fractious on occasion as Oscar the Grouch, Crewe also has a sweet, tender centre, taking us from a hearty laugh to a good cry in a single paragraph. Readers will relate to Crewe's ache at missing her mom, her nostalgia for her childhood, her frustrations at raising teenagers, and her impatience for terrible parking lot etiquette in equal measure. The book spans sixteen years' worth of columns for The Cape Bretoner Magazine, Cahoots Magazine, and The Chronicle Herald.
Are You Kidding Me?! is a side-splitting, heartwarming, Cape Breton–flavoured celebration of the little things.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781771087933 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nimbus |
| Publication date: | 10/10/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE BREAST PUMP INCIDENT
A friend of mine is about to have her first baby in a couple of weeks. She's forty. I never know whether to laugh or cry when I'm around her. She asks me what it's really like to give birth. I love this woman. Why tell her? The only advice I have given her is what the nurse told me as she wheeled me into the elevator when I was in labour with our first.
"Leave your dignity at the door, dear."
I could bore my friend to tears, or frighten her to death, with the multitude of strange and mysterious things that happened to my poor body over those four days. This was in the early eighties, when they didn't kick you out three hours after giving birth. But the incident that sticks most in my mind was the breast-pump affair.
I was determined to nurse my baby. It was the healthiest option for my little boy, and since I was going to be the world's best mother, I might as well start off right. It's the most natural thing in the world. It had to be dead easy.
Wrong.
I wept for the first two days. Nothing worked. I sucked at it. The baby didn't.
"Don't worry, dear," the nurse would say. "Sometimes it takes a little longer."
She would then position the baby in what they call a "football hold" to see if the little critter would grab on better. But since my breasts were as tight as footballs themselves, this proved difficult. Add to the equation my sore and cracked nipples, and you had a really happy girl by the time hubby came to visit.
"It's all your fault," I snivelled into a box of Kleenex.
"How's that?" he piped up.
"It just is!" I threw myself into a fetal position and howled.
"Well, I apologize then."
This guy was no fool. The nurse must have cornered him in the hallway and told him of the precarious mental state of new mothers. "Agree with everything she says." Nudge nudge, wink wink.
Finally, they took pity on me and tried a new tack. "We're going to use a breast pump, dear. It will give you a little relief and your baby will get your milk."
I'd seen them on drugstore shelves. They looked like little gramophones with a rubber bulb attached. Well, that seemed harmless enough. "Okay," I said.
I heard it before I actually saw it. Something heavy being wheeled down the hallway. The nurse arrived pushing a large piece of grey equipment with dials and what looked like fat test tubes hanging off it. I'm sure dairy herds the world over would recognize it instantly.
"I'm not sure I like the look of this," I squeaked.
"It looks worse than it is," the nurse assured me.
She latched my left boob into this monstrosity and turned the dial to minimum. It worked! The relief. I watched the watery milk collecting in the bottom of the tubes.
"Oh, I like this, can I take it home?"
The nurse smiled and said she would be back to do the right side in fifteen minutes. I sat there, happily milking away. I got a little bored by minute five, so I reached over and opened the bedside drawer and took out the Mars bar my sweetie had brought me the night before. Such a nice bloke. A chocolate-induced euphoria enveloped me as I munched away. Life was good.
In some faraway corner of my brain, I registered footsteps. Lots of them. They seemed to be stopping at my door.
"Mrs. Crewe, I have my students with me on rounds today. Hope you don't mind."
With a mouth full of chocolate nouget and caramel, my cries of, "Go away, don't come in!" were misinterpreted as, "By all means, please come in."
The doctor pulled the curtain back with a flourish just as I reached for the on/off switch. I miscalculated in my frenzy and hit the speed control instead.
My entire left breast disappeared up the tube. As I flailed wildly, the male residents beat a hasty retreat into the hallway. The females ran around making sympathetic noises. Only the doctor had the presence of mind to reach over and switch off the pump.
We spent the next few minutes extracting my pound of flesh from the miserable contraption. The nurse arrived, took one look at my face, and ushered everyone out of the room. She patted my back and told me that someday my girlish figure would return.
My self-respect, not so much.
CHAPTER 2THE PARENT-TEACHER INTERVIEW
Thank goodness summer's over and the kids are back in school. Parents everywhere are giving a little prayer of thanks. But we always forget there's a price to be paid for our few hours of freedom from the kiddies.
Not only are we taking out a bank loan to buy new clothes and shoes and school supplies, we must soon attend our first parent-teacher interview of the year. This is an exhausting procedure, and I'm not talking about physically getting to the school in question and running around like a rat in a maze or lining up behind a parent who insists on yammering about their little darling for twenty minutes.
It's the gruelling ordeal of trying to avoid "real-speak" with our child's teacher. It isn't a picnic for the teachers either. These interviews are a battle of wills, everyone trying to be polite without being hurtful, truthful without being mortally offensive. Hence the exhaustion. If only we could say what we mean and mean what we really say.
"Come in Mrs. Crewe, how nice to meet you," the teacher smiles. I hope this doesn't take too long, I want to go home and watch Downton Abbey.
"Very nice to meet you, Mrs. ..." Good lord, what do the kids call her? Mrs. Frumpy? That can't be right." Mrs. Frum, yes, very nice to meet you too." I hope this doesn't take too long, I want to go home and watch Downton Abbey.
"Take a seat, Mrs. Crewe." She could lose fifty pounds.
"Thank you." A little less eye shadow wouldn't go amiss.
"Well, let's talk about Junior." God, I'm dreading this.
"Yes, let's." God, I'm dreading this.
"Junior certainly is an active child." He should be on medication.
"Oh?" He's as lazy as sin at home.
"He's also very chatty and sociable." He never shuts up or sits in his seat.
"That's nice." He's a sweet child. Takes after his mama.
"However, he does seem to require a more structured learning environment." The kid has the attention span of a goldfish.
"His father and I try to help him with his homework." Who can understand Grade Five math anymore?
"Perhaps you might consider a tutor." Instead of depending on me to do everything for you.
"Perhaps." If you did your job properly, he wouldn't need a tutor.
"Every child has potential, and I know that with the right motivation we can help Junior with his gregarious and rambunctious playground activities." Don't you ever discipline the brat?
"By all means, whatever's necessary." Is she suggesting he's a bully?
"He also seems to be having trouble staying awake in class." What ungodly hour do you put him to bed?
"That's not like him." I told his father that computer needs to come out of his room.
"As you can see on this chart, he has a hard time with language skills." He has a mouth like a sewer.
"Every child is different, I imagine." Flaming cow.
"Well, we'll continue to monitor his progress. It was nice to meet you. Thank you for coming." Thank God that's over.
"Yes, thank you. Goodbye, now." Thank God that's over.
CHAPTER 3PET PEEVES
I am in the middle of the winter blahs. I can't seem to summon the energy to do anything. Except complain about my pet peeves. They seem to come to the surface with astonishing regularity during the winter months. Maybe because we are all a little testy by the time spring finally rolls around. Being on top of one another for months on end through a Canadian winter seems to have that effect.
My number-one all-time gross thing is when people take too much margarine, peanut butter, cheese whiz, jam, or especially honey to spread on their toast, and then they take the knife with the excess stuff on it and scrape it back into the container, jar, or dish.
Is this necessary? Who wants to eat something with toast crumbs in it? Why is it left to the mother of the household to remove this offensive muck? And no amount of screeching seems to stop this rampant habit.
I also hate it when I ask someone to bring up the laundry from the dryer. I'm usually running out the door when I say this, only to come back a couple of hours later to find the laundry out of the dryer, all right — but it's still in the clothesbasket at the end of my bed. A whole mountain of, by now, really, really wrinkly clothes. All their father's shirts for work. This never seems to happen when it's just towels or socks. Another thing that drives me mad is the fact that there is never a pencil to be found when I need one. I find them constantly when I'm vacuuming or dusting, but let the phone ring and they disappear like magic. Ditto for paper. We have phone messages covering the kids' artwork all over the fridge. A sweet picture of Santa Claus my daughter drew looks like he's waving and yelling, "Dad, call Bernie back, there's no hockey tomorrow."
I know you will agree with me that the miserable so-and-so who leaves two tablespoons of milk in the carton so they don't have to go to the fridge downstairs and bring up more deserves to be grounded.
The child who leaves the dog-food fork to harden with dog-food goop in the sink and doesn't wash it off should be made to eat supper with it.
Folding towels is not a hard job. I believe you just take both ends and join them together. Place over a towel rack. Simple. How is it possible that no one in the house except me can fold a towel to save their life? The towels are usually lumped together on the floor or hanging on for dear life over the shower-curtain rod. And naturally no one in their right mind would think of using the same towel twice in one day. They might get their sibling's germs on them. One wipe and throw it in the hamper.
Which reminds me of jeans. Do you remember washing your jeans when you were a teenager? I can't. They got washed once a month at most, and only because Mom dragged them off me physically. What is it with kids today? I have seen jeans worn a total of two hours thrown in the washer.
"Are you nuts?!" I yell at the offending child.
They get huffy. "There's dirt on them."
"Where? Get me a microscope, I must have missed it."
Finally, we have the really annoying habit of no one ever closing anything. Chip bags are a good example — four chip bags, open at the same time, getting staler by the minute. Shampoo bottles left lying on their sides, open and draining their life away into the tub. Cupboard doors left open at the perfect angle to bang the top of your head on. Toothpaste oozing out of the tube. Underwear hanging out of open bureau drawers, closet doors left gaping so everyone can see the mess. And no one seems to notice any of this but me.
I know in the scheme of things this doesn't amount to a hill of beans, but if one more child leaves the toilet seat up for me to fall into in the middle of the night, I'm buying a bus ticket outta here.
CHAPTER 4THE FAIRY GODMOTHER
My Cinderella is going to the winter ball, and I've turned into her fairy godmother. My wand's been working its magic up and down the corridors of the Mayflower Mall, and I've discovered a shocking secret.
I'm enjoying this more than she is.
For years and years, I've been the first one to mouth off about how ridiculous all this nonsense is, having your daughter look like a million bucks by spending a million bucks. And all so she can waltz into a school gym somewhere and prance around for three hours.
It used to be that mothers only had to worry about a prom in Grade Twelve. Now I'm told there are semiformal dances for kids graduating from elementary school into junior high.
Really?
I had a son go through the system first. For him, a winter ball would have been on the same pain scale as attending a ballet or mowing the lawn. I'd shake my head at girlfriends as they rushed around like fiends trying to find the perfect strapless bra or sparkly hair clip.
"It's only a stupid dance," I yelled at one friend as she shoved her daughter in the car to make the time-honoured trip to Halifax to find the perfect gown. She ran over my foot backing out of the driveway.
Now suddenly it's my turn — excuse me, my daughter's turn — and I've become a woman possessed. I have so much invested in this, both monetarily and emotionally, I should be going to this dance.
I didn't even realize it until the day we went shopping for the perfect shoe to go with her perfect dress. I made several suggestions in every shoe store in the mall. She informed me she had no intention of buying any shoe that looked like an old lady shoe. (All the pretty strappy ones.)
She was immediately attracted to one pair that would be suitable if you were into leather and whips and army boots. I knew better than to react, but inside I was pulling my hair out and screaming, "Are you serious? That fabulous dress, sullied by those stinking things? NO."
To my enormous relief, the saleslady didn't have her size. A very close call.
It occurred to me that my blood pressure had no business going through the roof over a pair of shoes. Shoes that were never going to be mine anyway.
What was going on?
I had Cinderella fever. That's what was going on.
If I'm like this over a stupid dance, what on earth is the prom going to be like? Or her wedding?! If this experience is anything to go by, you might as well kill me now.
I have a new appreciation about why mothers cry at weddings. Sadness that the shopping is over.
But it's more than that. It's this silly girly thing we females are known for. It's when your baby girl walks into a room or down the aisle and she looks like a princess. Your heart stops for a minute because you honestly can't believe that she's yours.
She's so young and beautiful.
Were we young and beautiful too? Probably. But we missed it at the time because we were in a lather over a pimple.
So here we are, thirty years later, getting to do it all over again. This isn't about the winter ball. It's about grown women getting to play with their real-live Barbie dolls, and secretly loving every minute of it.
For those of you who don't have a daughter, borrow one. Then find a magic wand, a pumpkin, and a couple of mice.
And have a ball.
CHAPTER 5THAT KID
I'm sorry, but you'll just have to indulge me. This column is for me alone and no one else. A selfish but necessary act.
My very first column was about my son leaving home for university. Even writing under my maiden name didn't afford him the protection he needed. I gave him an alias.
Today, I am outing him. It doesn't matter. He doesn't know you and you don't know him. I'm sure there are worse ways of embarrassing him. Well, maybe not, but too bad. I'm the mother and I've had a lot of practice. His friends don't read this, anyway.
Since Paul won't let me put his graduation picture in the paper, won't be going to his graduation ceremony, and won't buy a school ring or yearbook, I have no other way of letting him know that all I feel like doing right now is tweaking his cheek and shaking it back and forth vigorously like some old biddy.
(Newsflash: He did go to his graduation, and I knocked over a few hundred other parents to get to the front of the stage to take his picture and the battery in the camera chose that particular moment to die. I nearly did too.)
Parents the world over are excited when their children graduate from university. But I'm sorry, folks, this is Paul we're talking about.
This child of ours has told us every day since he was five that he wanted to blow up the school. Shocking but true.
He was excited about his first day. He came home that afternoon and announced, "There. That's over."
When I told him he had to go back the next day, this "blowing up the school" business started.
He'd get annoyed if I asked him anything.
"Where's your seat?"
"Behind Bradley."
"No. Where do you sit in the room?"
"Behind Bradley."
"Okay then, where does Bradley sit?"
He looked at me like I had two heads.
"In front of me."
Do you get the picture? This was when he was five. It's been downhill ever since.
I had one lovely teacher come up to me and tell me it was the highlight of her teaching career when she tried very hard to give him a great day at school and asked him about it as he was leaving.
"Did you have a good day, Paul?"
He shrugged. "Yeah."
With that ringing endorsement, she floated into the teachers' lounge.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Are You Kidding Me?!"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Lesley Crewe.
Excerpted by permission of Nimbus Publishing Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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