Can you put a price on my blog? If you could, I would hope that it would be about $25 an entry, which would mean that THIS blog would suffice as a birthday gift to my old fart of a mother who turned 55 today. Finally eligible for senior citizen status and AARP membership (can't take credit for that joke- thanks to Nana), she has reached a point in her life where each birthday serves as a reminder of all of the years she has spent on this Earth. So, in honor of this landmark event, I have prepared a list of the accomplishments and impacts that my mother has had over the years.
- She has served as a role model for five younger brothers, teaching them all the proper social etiquette and molding them into the upstanding citizens that they are today- men who still know how to get drunk and light pallets of wood on fire.
- She has endured 25 years of pee, poop, vomit, and Hepititus B at Kent Phillips Elementary. She has been bitten, kicked, scratched, and cussed out (cussed out? I've been in the South too long). She has donned the KP beaver costume on far too many occasions, pretending that she is taking a bullet for the other staff members when she actually enjoys it way more than she really should (seriously- sometimes she lounges around the house in it, sporting Chicklets on her teeth as she reads the blogs). She has mentored young, new teachers. She has watched (in envy) the retirement of old, experienced teachers. She has seen A LOT.
- She has reigned over the Palace of Platt Street, an opulent residence where the windows blow out of the frames on occasion, where a majestic and intelligent dog licks trespassers as they approach our front door, where strange possum-rodent-rats sometimes explode out of the drainpipes after intense rainstorms.
- She married and domesticated the wild bachelor of a man known to my siblings and I as the one and only Pa-ski, altering him from a long-haired, Old-Milwaukee-drinking rebel to a shaven-head, Coors-Light-drinking rebel. This is a man who has slain a beehive under our deck at 2 am, a man who has glued teeny tiny shingles onto a dollhouse at 2 am, a man who has driven into a high school party, high beams blazing, looking for his daughter making out in the driveway at 2 am. He has participated in a Great Cookie Exchange, joined a mail-away gourmet coffee club, gone on multiple male-only gaycations (to Vegas, Williamsburg, and NYC). He hangs dry-wall. He makes a brambleberry wine dessert ice cream sundae. You are one lucky lady, Ma.
- Finally, and most importantly, she has bred and raised three children, whose vast accomplishments include the following:
- Winning a national championship (and conference championship)
- Dating a national champion
- Modeling for a bed and breakfast
- Being incredibly attractive
- Breeding chinchillas
- Writing a soon-to-be award winning blog that captured the hearts of Americans everywhere
- Pushing a car over a cell phone
- Sketching extremely good cars on notebook paper
- Running out of gas in about every place imaginable
- Knowing what language is spoken in Rome (eventually)
- And many, many more
Who says you haven't lived a fulfilled life?! Just look at this annotated list of all the wonderful things you have done and there is no way you can even think the words "old and washed-up". Think of all the things you can accomplish in your next 55 years... maybe you can have more children that can match or even exceed (impossible to do, it seems) the things your current children have done. Or maybe you can devote another 25 years to molding the youth of America. And even if neither of those paths pan out, you still have Pa. Maybe by the time you're 110 he'll finally redo the pink bathroom.
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