Desperate Housewife

Did you see the season finale of Desperate Housewives where they flashed forward 5 years? Glamorous Gabby was fat, make-up-less, and exhausted. Apparently, it was because she had twin 5-year-old girls who were playing dress up in her designer gowns, faces smeared with lipstick. It bugged me. I thought, "Why do they always portray moms as haggard and homely, and at the end of their ropes? Motherhood is fun and rewarding!"

So, flash forward three days to my afternoon. I'm on my hands and knees in the 2008 equivalent of a housecoat, eating potato chips out of the carpet like a starved coyote. I'm laughing to myself because, suddenly, I understand Future Gabby on a molecular level. "Right," I think to myself, "So this is why moms are not portrayed like supermodels on TV."

Let me explain: After six months of winter, it's suddenly 90 degrees outside, so I have adopted a t-shirt swimsuit cover up as my official uniform. You'll see it, trust me. I'll be wearing it until Labor Day. No make-up, of course, because it all melted off while I was at the grocery store with Free and Jake. That's when I bought the chips. You buy things that aren't on your list when boys are wrestling over a penny under your cart. (You also get home with things like parakeet food and twelve dollar can openers.)

Kids travel in packs, and the pack happened to be at my house yesterday afternoon. (Is pack the right word? What is the word for a group of piranhas? School doesn't seem appropriate.) Someone ripped open a bag of potato chips and the whole bag went flying all over the carpet. I sent all the kids outside so I could clean the chips up before they got ground in. But I didn't want to waste all of them, so I was eating the whole ones as I scooped them up. They were so greasy and delicious, and time was of the essence, to avoid grease stains on the carpet. So I was shoveling the chips into my mouth pretty fast and calling it efficiency. That's when I had the epiphany about why moms look so undone on TV. Crisis is funnier than perfection, and we can all relate. When I was twenty, I didn't envision my future having any scenes where I eat snack foods out of the carpet. Had I known, I might have been terrified. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and sometimes it just leads to bliss. Even a day like this is heaven, because now the pack is outside in the plastic pool, eating soggy potato chips out of a bowl. And the carpet has just been vacuumed, so I'm one step closer to "perfection."