peevish mama

I’m in the dog house for having stayed out too late last night celebrating Nanook of the North’s birthday. It was supposed to be a delicious celebratory feast at 112 Eatery with a dozen and change of her BFFs – a lovely evening dinner strategically timed for all of us to miss having to put our respective offspring to bed, but not meant to extend beyond what would otherwise be considered prudent or proper for a Sunday night.

If intention counts for anything, and I would argue that it should, it was not my intent when I got picked up at 5:30 in my new spring coat, to come rolling in the door at two thirty in the morning. Not at all. If it had been, I wouldn’t have taken my gigantic purse and no lipstick. And no cell phone.

Our dinner was delicious and loud and funny and when it was time to go, Nanook, Crackerjack, Pretty Young Thing and I looked at our watches and made a snip snap decision to stay downtown. It was only eight thirty, after all, the night but a fresh faced choir boy. Some of the other ladies were tempted, but begged off in an enviable display of good judgment. We four miscreants finished our drinks and traipsed to the elevator where Crackerjack did a standing splits for whatever reason sending us into peals of laughter and a trip to nowhere. When the doors opened we spilled out onto the same floor, giggling and completely befuddled by how our waiter had managed to beat us downstairs, that sneaky fleet-footed bastard. And so it began.

Downtown is pretty dead on a Sunday night, but it turns out there is plenty of mischief to be gotten into when all you need to be completely entertained is some drinks, some tunes, and some really funny lady friends. At about eleven I called Doctor Dash to let him know I would be staying out after dinner for a few drinks. I patted myself on the back. Responsible. Considerate. Later that phone message came back to haunt me.

But I called you – I left a message, she said.

You sounded like you were only going to stay out a little longer, he said.  

And you believed me? she did not say.

Here’s the thing. Asking me to peel myself away from the forcefield of hilarity that we manage to conjure up any time we go out is like asking Pepe Le Pew to keep his stinky paws off the cute petite fille skunk. I simply cannot tear myself away because there has not been nearly enough crazy laughing and unfettered shenanigans in my life since college. And I miss it terribly. Back then my college girlfriends set the baseline for female friendship and good times – there was no recapturing that once we scattered around the country after graduation. Then came many years of babies and young children and the attendant exhaustion and general inability to take on anything else. But now I’ve made some new girlfriends and we’re all coming out of that bleary-eyed time, trying to figure out who we are again, what we’re going to do with our lives. In many ways, it feels like we are revisiting those uncertain times of our youth. There’s a lot to talk about and break down, there’s a lot laugh about and now, more than ever, we need to laugh. Age-appropriateness, situation-appropriateness be damned. What kind of a person can tap her watch and say, ok, that’s enough fun for me. I am powerless. Utterly powerless to walk away from a good time. And these girls are nothing, if not a good time.

Doctor Dash totally knows this about me. He knows I can’t say when. He knows I always want just a few more minutes, one more song, one more drink, one more laugh, one more long goodbye.

But just because he knows he married a party barnacle, it fails to mitigate how annoying it must be for him to be woken up as I try to eat girl scout cookies and balance a flashlight in bed so I can read myself to sleep at three o’clock in the morning. Crinkle crinkle. Or having to get up to let me in because I forgot my key. Or being blanketed by a vague sense of worry until he hears me clunking around the kitchen scavenging for food. He can go through all the motions of going to sleep, but poor Doctor Dash can’t really sleep until I’m back home safe. When I was sixteen I wouldn’t have understood. Now I understand. And I am deeply thankful that I happen to matter this much to someone. 

Chastened and hungover, so much of this little scenario sent me shooting right back to my youth – I stayed out too late, I was unreachable by phone, I screwed up, my dad er husband was mad because he couldn’t go to sleep and he had a tough day at work ahead of him. When you’re young and you mess up, you skulk around trying to avoid your parents. You suffer the consequences. Maybe there’s a shouting match. But in the end, what can you do? When you screw up at this age, you fix it. There is no other choice. And the beauty of it is, you have the wisdom to acknowledge when you need to apologize, when you need to own up. And now, unlike then, you’ve got a few tricks up your sleeve.

So what did I do? I started cooking like a motherfucker. I decided I’d do an asian-style pulled pork and with coffee and Advil in one hand and ginger, soy, fish sauce, onion, garlic, and thai chilis in the other, I concocted a beautiful bath for a succulent pork shoulder to spend the day slow cooking. The smell that filled the house by ten a.m. was amazing, and if that didn’t say I’m sorry – then at least my text message would. Actually, I get a bit of the clam hands when I try to text and after the third try, the best I could do was spqqxy. I pressed send, hoping Dash would know what I meant.

I am really really spqqxy.