Authors: Annie Jones
Mom Over Miami (19 page)
Subject: Nacho Mama’s House column
Greetings from Miami! That’s right—I’m sending out my column at the last minute, in the first hours of my preseason vacation. I tell you that, not to engender sympathy, but because I feel the need to be totally honest.
At last.
Never in my days taking classes in journalism or my time managing the clinic in Wileyville or even in all my years of experience as Moonie Shelnutt’s daughter did I ever imagine I would end up writing frank confessions. But here I am about to do just that. Those of you who have told me your secrets, don’t sweat, though. Just send money and everything will conveniently be forgotten.
A joke. Am compelled to point that out. Ever since an anonymous letter writer went to great pains to let me know I am both too glib and not too witty, I find myself questioning every remark. Examining every turn of phrase for what might offend or confuse or simply fall short of the mark. Believe me, the supply is so plentiful that this act could very well take up what’s left of my free time! I hope to work on that, on my writing, and do a better job of it in the future.
But then, that’s the story of my life, isn’t it? To step up to the plate, each and every time fearing I don’t have what it takes, floundering, then afterward vowing I will do better next time.
And next time comes and…
Tonight I am in Miami curled up on a king-size bed in a beautiful hotel room that I had planned on sharing with my darling husband. But something came up at the office and he couldn’t get away just now. He asked me to make a last-minute change in plans and I did. I came alone.
Yes, friends and readers, I have run away from home.
Or I tried to run away.
But it didn’t take me long at all to discover that the things that drove me out the door, onto the expressway and through the barrage of airport bag scanners, drug sniffers, shoe examiners and all the other essential security measures of our time, were not things I could escape. You’ve heard of someone having a lot of personal baggage? Y’all, I have so much that if it
had manifested itself in real trunks and suitcases we’d have never gotten off the ground. I could have walked to Florida faster than that poor overloaded plane could have flown.
But, since the only one who feels the weight of that kind of emotional baggage is the one carrying it, we made it here on time. And I started to unpack.
Not to press a metaphor too far, but the more I rummaged through the luggage of my life the more I realized I had been lugging around a lot of stuff I should have gotten rid of a long time ago. Worry, for one. And fear.
I guess to say “I worry a little” might sound to some of you like saying the Atlantic Ocean is a little damp. I worry all the time. I worry about my family. I worry about my work. I worry about my family’s work.
And I worry about you, dear reader. I worry each and every time that I send off my column that you will read it and finally see the truth. That I’m a fraud.
Not fit to be published, for sure. Neither clever nor particularly insightful. Not as good as…You can fill in the blank, from your favorite syndicated columnist to your great-grandniece who writes you letters from North Dakota.
I am wholly, totally and woefully inadequate. Not just for newspaper writing but for so many things that I somehow have gotten myself stuck into.
Snack Mom. How can they stomach me?
Nursery Supervisor. I think I need crib notes!
Assistant Classroom Helper. More like Assistant? Classroom, help her.
Christmas Pageant Director. We Three Kings, Disoriented Are? Don’t know why I got myself into this one and not sure how I will pull it off.
Uncompensated After-Hours Office Cleaner. At least for this one I am paid what I’m worth!
That was a joke, too.
Honestly, I don’t mind cleaning in my husband’s office, considering the work they do has so much meaning. The women who put in long hours there contribute so much to the health, happiness and welfare of others. I am in awe of them.
Just as I am in awe of so many women that I cross paths with during any given day.
The other soccer moms who practically live in their Mommy-vans but still find time to pitch in with schoolwork and bake homemade goodies.
The tireless volunteers at my church who, even though I sometimes make light of their foibles in my column, give freely of themselves with joy, creativity and boundless energy.
The neighbor lady willing to step in and help should I ever need her to remind me not to take myself so seriously.
My sisters who love me no matter what (not always an easy job), and who believed in me enough to submit my work before I even thought of it as work. They do so much: running a business, working for the city,
maintaining a family and chasing after You-Know-Who (Daddy, do not go around telling people your youngest forgot your name). They are the cornerstones of both home and community.
And lastly, my Aunt Phiz, who flew all the way from India (not China) to come to my aid when she saw I had gotten myself into a hole and needed someone to hold up a light, show me the way and to pray for me.
You women inspire me.
You are amazing.
Delightful.
Strong.
Smart.
And a bit intimidating.
You are the reason I try so hard and why I take my failures even harder. I see all that you accomplish with your time, all you strive for, all you give, and am humbled at how often and in how many ways I cannot measure up.
You all are my heroes.
Not to slight the men in my life.
My minister, my father, my son and my husband have all shown extreme patience (except Daddy—on this score like daughters like father.) They have treated me with love, trust, goodwill and a colossal sense of humor. Really, for example, only a man who loved a good joke could have pegged me to direct the Christmas pageant after my inept handling of the nursery redo.
Each of these men has taught me something. I adore them all in different ways for it.
But let’s get real, folks.
In the knock-down, brag-out, whiner-take-all brat-race of Mommies and Minivans, it’s definitely a woman’s world. For that I am grateful. The hand that rocks the cradle most definitely rocks!
It’s been suggested to me by these remarkable women (and a few of the men) that I need to take the time now to listen, to learn, to laugh, to leave my fears and worries with the Lord.
It’s not about outmothering the other moms, winning accolades or the desperate need to be liked at all costs. It’s not about playing peacemaker or cake-baker or nursery wall-painter in the small hope someone will pat me on the head and tell me “Good job.” It’s about doing what a woman must do because she is called by God. I am called by God to love and be obedient to His will.
The prayer of Hannah, as evidenced in 1 Samuel 2:3, is still true today. “‘Do not keep talking so proudly or let your mouth speak such arrogance, for the Lord is a God who knows and by Him deeds are weighed.’”
By Him my deeds will be weighed.
It’s sound advice. I think I will take it, do my best and leave the rest with God.
O
nly thing left to do was hit send, then hit the hay.
H
annah couldn’t recall when she had slept so soundly…or so late!
“Nine o’clock?” She forced her eyes to focus on the glowing green numbers a few inches from her pillow. That couldn’t be right. She kept her alarm set for six-fifteen. Even so she never heard it go off. Tessa always woke up well before—
“Tessa!” She sat bolt upright, realizing she hadn’t gotten up once in the night with the baby.
The crisp white sheets slid down to pool in her lap. Glorious sunlight streamed in through a wall-size window.
No coffee pot dripping. No Squirrelly Girl giving the low familiar
hooty-whoo
sound that the greyhound made to demand to be fed. No Aunt Phiz singing. No Payt showering. No Sam grumbling. No Tessa fussing. And when
Hannah got out of the bed, her feet would hit carpet, not scattered bits of dry cereal. Not slobber-covered dog toys. Not Payt’s day-old discarded socks.
“I am definitely not in Loveland anymore, Toto.” She stretched and savored the comparison to the storybook heroine who found herself transported to a magical, unfamiliar world.
“Where people bring breakfast right to your door,” she said even as she picked up the phone and opened the room-service menu.
Fifteen minutes, they had said.
Everyone knew that in hotel-service speak that meant twenty, maybe even thirty minutes. More than enough time to grab a shower and read…
“The paper!” Her column. Last night after she had opened up her address book and hit send, she had put the thing out of her mind. But it was morning now, and time to face the music.
She just hoped it wasn’t a funeral dirge for her career.
“You can do this, Hannah. You were honest with them. You should be able to handle them returning the favor.” She drew in her breath, rifled through her makeup case for a hair scrunchie and padded barefoot to the small table where her laptop still sat open.
She settled into the sturdy little chair, brought her feet up and pulled her hair back. She caught a glimpse of herself in her laptop’s blackened screen. With her once-sophisticated hair caught up in a ponytail, with no
makeup and wearing pink pajamas with green cats on them, she looked all of twelve years old.
She felt all of twelve…and a hundred and twelve…all at once.
“Deep breath.” She took one. “Turn on the computer.”
The machine hummed to life.
“And…connect.” She pressed the button and waited.
“You’ve got—”
“Mayhem!” she said loud enough to drown out the cheery synthetic voice that usually greeted her when she checked her e-mail. “What is going on here?”
Screen name after screen name scrolled up one after the other, and not a one of them trying to sell a thing. It wasn’t the number that staggered the mind, though, it was the names. Practically her whole address book accounted for.
And reading the headers, she instantly knew why.
Her fingers flew over the keys to help her confirm.
“I didn’t.” But of course she had. Physically worn-out from the trip, emotionally worn down from the events of the day, when she had opened her address book to send her column off to her editor, she clicked the wrong icon. She had accidentally sent her unedited, extemporaneous outpouring to everyone she knew.
And apparently most of them felt moved to respond.
One. That’s the number of people she had prepared herself to hear from, the exact amount of criticism she considered ample for the piece she had submitted. “But now the whole world can tell me I am a dopey sap who should stick to writing about nachos.”
Oh, goody
.
“Better start with an easy one.” She highlighted Sadie’s address, but before she could open it, a rectangle popped up on her screen, accompanied by the pleasant little jingle of an instant message.
wlmom: Hey, Hannah! It’s me, Lauren.
NachoMama: Hi.
wlmom: No time to chat. Just opened your fabulous e-mail and was trying to figure out when I’d have time to compose a deserving response.
NachoMama: Please don’t trouble yourself. Sending out mass apology for the address book flub later today.
wlmom: Address flub?
NachoMama: Meant for eyes of
Wileyville Guardian News
editor only. Expected him to help me shape it up before anyone else saw it—if he even thought anyone else should see it. Yikes! Another Hannah-produced disaster.
wlmom: Stop that! I, for one, am pleased to have gotten the undiluted version.
NachoMama: Thanks.
wlmom: Want me to add you to my prayer list?
NachoMama: Sure, couldn’t hurt.
wlmom: Enjoy the break.
NachoMama: Will try.
wlmom: Wait! Before I sign off—one question?
NachoMama: What?
wlmom: Where did you get the idea that the other soccer moms had time to bake?
NachoMama: The boys have bragged from day one that their mother’s snacks were homemade.
wlmom:
LOL!
Hannah, Homemade is what everyone around here says when they mean they’re from the Home Oven Bakery.
NachoMama: Store bought?
wlmom: A regional chain, no less. You can get the stuff at some groceries or at one of like, three or four locations.
NachoMama:
wlmom: There’s one near the kids’ school. Let’s meet there one morning after we drop off the boys and talk over muffins and coffee.
NachoMama: That would be great. Now, can I ask you a question?
wlmom: Shoot.
NachoMama: Does your screen name stand for world’s number one mom?
wlmom: LOL! Hannah, you’re a hoot!
NachoMama: Thanks, I think.
wlmom: It’s my initials—Wilma Lauren.
NachoMama: Wilma?
wlmom: World’s number one mom! Where would you even get that?
NachoMama: Just guessing.
wlmom: Well, guess again. At least half of the time I feel exactly the way you said you felt in your column.
Everyone else seems so calm and cool and collected. Not me.
NachoMama: Thank you, Lauren.
wlmom: Thank you, Hannah, for starting my day off on such a thoughtful note. Am adding reading through the book of Samuel to my burgeoning to-do list! Bye.
NachoMama: Bye.
Lauren Faison felt just like her. Who would ever have imagined?
Sadie for one.
Loved it. Love you. Love yourself and see you when you get back
.
April echoed the thoughts.
Aunt Phiz promised to stand by with prayer and light as long as Hannah needed her.
Hannah whizzed through those, but when she got to her minister’s name, she paused. Had she insulted him with her crack about not knowing why he chose her? Would he dress her down for her flippant words?
Only one way to see.
Dear Hannah,
How you are going to handle the Christmas pageant? With style, girl! With style! And all the help you need. Just ask.
She smiled until it sprang to mind exactly the kind of help she’d gotten for her last church undertaking—the women poised and already waiting to help her right over the edge.
“DIYCyd has sent you an e-card.” She searched and found the header easily. An e-card. From Cydney. “Hmm, wonder if she made it herself?”
If it were a do-it-yourself e-card, would it crash her computer? Hannah held her breath and clicked the blue link.
Doves and flowers and rainbows filled then faded from her screen while the computer dinked out the notes of “Wind Beneath My Wings.” At last the words “You Are My Hero” swelled against a pink and orange sunset.
“Okay.” Hannah waited for some kind of explanation, but the program ended with only the choices to view it again, respond to the sender or send the message to someone else.
“What message?” she asked the screen.
Click
.
Back to her mail and the one, two, three e-mails from the other half of the duo. “Of course, Jacqui would have to outdo her sister.”
E-mail one: Thank you,
E-mail two: Oops! Hit send with my charm bracelet. Thank you, Thank you, Th
E-mail three: Took my charm bracelet off. Maybe now I can get through a whole note.
Thank you, Hannah. Thank you a hundred times
over. You said it all. How I feel, and Cydney, we were on the phone to each other first thing this morning. You made it possible for me to tell you, and I speak—type?—for Cydney, too, our truth. We are miserable decorators.
“You don’t say?” Hannah shut her eyes and shook her head to keep the images of the nursery suite incident from assailing her. After a moment she turned back to the e-mail.
We never wanted to decorate or design anything. Ever.
“Oh.” She got it now. Jacqui wasn’t confessing they made miserable decorators. They were miserable
because
they were decorators. That was her truth.
Gluing plastic gems to tennis shoes and putting up wallpaper borders in the guest powder room is one thing, but interior decorating as a business is beyond us. We just did it because people said we would be good at it.
“Really? Were these people drinking at the time?” Bad, Hannah. But she couldn’t help it; knowing that the best mom in the world and the worst interior decorators shared the same insecurities that she did made her a little giddy.
We still want to do everything we can for the church and the nursery program.
“Giddiness subsiding,” Hannah murmured.
So we thought why not take over child-care duties Sunday mornings? If we shared them between the three of us, we could all serve and still attend some of the services.
Hannah sat back, overwhelmed. That was the kind of help she could really use. The gift of time. “Wow.”
She raised her hand to hit the reply button when a knock at the door drew her away.
“Room service!”
“Oh, breakfast!” She lost track of the time. So much for showering and getting dressed. She squirmed into her robe and grabbed her wallet to get some tip money. “Be right there.”
She rushed to the door then, remembering a show she’d watched on the perils of travel, made use of the peephole in the center of the door. “Flowers?”
She couldn’t get the door open fast enough. “I bet my husband sent these, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know, ma’am, I just deliver them.”
“Oh, and breakfast—guess you didn’t make that, either.” She laughed.
He didn’t. “No, ma’am.”
“Um, okay, then.” She stopped herself from launching into a lengthy story about how the misdirected newspaper column and the flood of empathy and support it had brought her had her unusually energized. Flashing her brightest I-am-really-not-a-nut smile, she pressed the tip into his hand and thanked him as she shut the door behind him.
The room filled with the aroma of bacon and roses, and instantly Hannah thought if they would ever make that a perfume, she’d buy it by the gallon. “They’d sell it by the gallon, too, in stores that sold everything for a dollar.”
She left the breakfast tray on the dresser and set the roses down by her laptop. She took a deep whiff of the dark peach blooms, worked the small rectangular card free and murmured, “I am married to the most wonderful man in all of…Dr. Briggs’s office?”
She blinked. Sure enough. Payt hadn’t sent the roses—the women in Dr. Briggs’s office had!
She read the succinct but very welcome message. “‘We put a sign in the break room. ‘Nacho Mama Doesn’t Work Here Anymore. Clean Up After Yourself!’ Enjoy your well-earned vacation.’”
More time. Wow, she wouldn’t know what to do with it all. Starting with right now. Here she was all alone in a strange city in a strange state with no itinerary or plans. It was the kind of thing that sounded blissful in the midst of her usual chaos, but now she hardly knew what to do first.
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. She needed to make a phone call before she did anything more.
She sat at the table and dialed out even as she resumed opening e-mails.
The phone rang once, twice, three times, and she wondered if maybe they had all slept in when the one voice she wanted to hear most in the world answered.
“Bartlett here.”
His voice warmed her to the center of her being. “Bartlett here, too.”
“Good morning, sunshine.”
“Well, the sun is shining in Miami, but how about where you are?”
“The weather is okay and so are we, though I might have heard the rumblings of low thunderclouds coming from Tessa’s room.”
“That’s what you get for feeding her popcorn.”
“It wasn’t popcorn, it was canned chili.”
She plunked her feet down so hard her chair squeaked. “What?”
“I was trying to improve on your nachos for the boys. Say, did you know that canned chili holds that can shape the entire length of time it takes to sail across the kitchen?”
She put her hand over her eyes. “I was going to ask if I should make plans to hurry home, but now I might just add an extra few days onto my stay.”
“You can, you know.”
“What can? We still talking chili here?”
“No. I think we’re talking turkey. If that’s what they call it when two people are speaking frankly.”
“There’s a bad pun in there someplace about turkey franks, I know.”
“Hannah.” His voice was deep and sincere.
“Payt?” Hers, more tentative.
“I’m sorry.”
“
You’re
sorry? I’m the one who ran away.”
“No, you’re the one who followed through on the plans we’d already agreed to. And I don’t blame you.”
“You should. I acted like such a baby.”
“You acted like someone who was tired of always being a good soldier.”