Mouths of Babes

The other day I was watching my daughter watch a bowl of powdered chemicals turn into mashed potatoes when it occurred to me the contents of the bowl wasn't the only thing that was a hot mess.

From the mouths of babes. Or what goes into the mouths of babes, whatever.

Back in the day -- when phones were still attached to buildings by umbilical cords and being wired meant you'd just eaten some mushrooms and disappeared into the wallpaper -- one of my former friends gave me a coffee mug for my fortieth birthday, note the word "former." The mug is black, and features a rickety old man and a message:

Father Time
Can Really Kick
The Shit Out
Of You

I was forty. I didn't know the half of it. I was a total fetus.

Fast forward a millenium or so to my current situation: not only did the old dickwad kick the shit out of me, he kicked all the rest of it out, too. It's all gone, everything. I'm an empty vessel, a haunted house, a ghost ship.

The other morning I got out of bed (so far, so good!) and from his side of the bed, my husband spoke his first words of the day:

"What's that sound?"

"It's the wind careening through my skeletal structure, Bubba," I hissed, "gotta problem with that?"

As I clattered into the bathroom and turned on the light, I accidentally looked in the mirror and had my first TIA* of the day. Usually I try to leave the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall routine until after my face has had a chance to wake up, usually around 9 in the evening following my first magnum of pinot.

"OMG!" I screamed. Literally. I screamed those letters. In italics.

"UOK?" That was my husband from the bedroom. We like to think of ourselves as bilingual.

"NM!" I called out. "NBD! ILY!"

Telling him that my face had finally fallen right off my head and was now gathered around my neck like the waddle of a turkey would've been TMI. The poor man's suffered enough these past few decades having to watch me morph into some odd ectoplasmic lifeform right before his eyes.

This was it, my wakeup call. Something had to be done. But what?

Legend has it that in an effort to pull back the years, as it were, Marlene Dietrich would pull back strands of her hair into a tight underlying knot at the top of her head, thereby raising her scalp and effecting a sort of poor man's temporary facelift. Not that she was poor, or a man, for that matter, although rumor has it the "man" part's up for discussion in some circles.

Trust me, I've tried this. On several occasions. I had to pull my hair so tight to get my face to budge even a centimeter that I yanked out handfuls of the stuff. And believe me, there's not much where that came from. Now I have another problem: trying to cover up the two bald spots hovering above my ears. Forget Kafka's dung beetle, the evidence shows it: there's definitely a turkey lurking in my mirror.

So there I sat, watching my daughter spoon "mashed potatoes" into her lovely but dangerous mouth, when it occurred to me I needed a new face cream. And not just any face cream, one with a nuclear option. I wondered aloud whether the ectoplasmic foodform in my daughter's bowl might not suffice, after all, hadn't we just watched it morph from a mound of dry powder into a fluffy cloud of softness (Just Add Water!) right before our eyes?

My daughter raised her eyelashes, lowered her spoon, exhaled. All of this very slowly. I could sense words forming inside that lovely but dangerous head in about the same length of time it took for the "potatoes" to form.

"Mom," said the mouth, "please tell me you're still seeing that shrink."

"LOL!" I chortled. "JK! JT!" I pride myself on my hipness as a parent.

Another pregnant pause, then the mouth spoke again:

"Mom," it said, "does the word 'Mr. Potato Head' mean anything to you?"

"Ha! Ha!" I guffawed. "That's three words," I chuckled. "And I'm a Ms.!" I snorted.

There's just no end to my witty repartee.

My daughter sighed heavily and turned back to her astronaut food, which had the same soft and fluffy consistency as her not-quite-sixteen-year-old face. I reminded myself that I used-to-be-not-quite-sixteen.

"TWTTIN!" I editorialized, and grabbed the magnum of pinot and repaired to my belfry.

Where I spent the next seven hours surfing the web for a nuclear option, marveling at the plethora of outrageous shit available to steep one's face in. At around 9 o'clock I clattered into the bathroom, turned on the light, looked in the mirror. A handful of faces stared blurrily back at me.

And here's the best part: I'm happy to report that not one of those faces resembled a large gallinaceous bird. That lurking turkey had disappeared from that mirror (Just Add Wine!) right before my eyes. Who needs a $500 collagen recovery system?

"WTF!" I called out giddily. "JAW!"

And that's just what I did.




*For the technically-challenged:

TIA — Transient Ischemic Attack (a.k.a. mini stroke)
OMG — Oh My God
UOK — You Okay?
NM — Never Mind
NBD — No Big Deal
ILY — I Love You
TMI — Too Much Information
LOL — Laugh Out Loud
JK — Just Kidding
JT — Just Teasing
TWTTIN — That Was Then This Is Now
WTF — What The Fuck
JAW — Just Add Wine