Boozy Sunday

Today is my husband's day off.

He has tomorrow, too, but this is the only day of the week where our family members also have the day off.  So there is pressure.

Like many guys, my husband avoids making plans with family members in general.  In specific, he waits until the last possible moment to schedule seeing people or expects me, the family's personal cruise director, to call or email everyone, arrange when to get together, plan where and what and when we will eat, dress everyone, grease up their hair, and pack the diaper bag and, if we are going places where kids usually aren't, pack the "extra toy bag".  That never gets really used.  That sits there as our kids get cranky and unmanageable wherever we are, no matter what great! stuff we cram in there.

I grumble but I don't mind.

Who we gather with is less laissez faire.

Here is what you get:  with my family you get food, since my mom will cook or get so preoccupied with where the food is going to come from, that she gets crazy pants about ordering it or buying ingredients and cooking it herself wherever she is.  This cooking at my house began when I was pregnant with Del and I am really all cool with it.  She feels so bad my kids are in an "active phase" (I always look exhausted) that she even does the dishes herself.  Sometimes I feel guilty.  But mostly I feel well fed and dishes is one of the everyday chores I really despise.  No one else but my own mommy understands this about me, and I appreciate it.

You also get zany conversations with my family.

And silliness which hides the fact my dad was bipolar and abusive and we're just so glad my parents finally got divorced.

But you don't get booze because my mom is Temperance Tammy.

She is not just anti serving, she really does not like the idea of it at all.   It does have to do with the fact many of her uncles ate their cornflakes with gin instead of milk, that kind of thing.  In fact, when I had my first real drink at a late eighteen, my first thought was "Uncle George? Whatever is in this red plastic frat boy cup tastes exactly like your visits!"  When we go to her house, my husband, who really digs on booze, stops and gets stuff to bring.  My mother has learned not to mind. And above her lives my sister and brother in law and neither of them have met a drink they haven't loved.  But that is the deal.  If you get sloshed, the rest of my family basically gets the impression you are a drunk, and keeps that impression for basically ever.

With my husband's family you get his mom.  Mavis.  Mavis has woken up without clothes on on the floor of her bedroom after having been carried there by my husband's dad.  Mavis will order a Manhattan  at lunch and then toss back three whiskey and gingers after you deposit her in her kitchen and then tell you stories about when she was first married and rich and traveled and had a maid.  Mavis repeats herself. Sometimes in the same minute.  But Mavis can be a good time as long as you ignore her love of the Republicans.  If you can't ignore that, then you are miserable.  And you figure out pretty quickly how easily dupped the public can be into voting for someone who would defund NPR and send "those people" back to their "country" and not want to let other "people" have food stamps or heating oil in the winter.

I love Mavis.

But some Sundays I am not in the mood for Mavis.

Our car is small.  When Mavis joins us I end up sitting with half my butt off the seat crammed between two car seats and two nutters vying for my attention since I am in reach.  I am not in the no man's land of the front seat, but touchable.  I can't let it all hang and relax-- as much as one would squished between to Evenflos-- because every time I drift off Mavis asks me a question.  And Mavis is my mother in law.  And my kids' nana.  I want things to be pleasant.  Fun.  So I don't get to sleep, even with my husband saying, "Um Mave, I think she's asleep.  She doesn't get to--" which is met with "OHHHHH!!!  GO TO SLEEP!  OF COURSE!"  But since Mavis forgets, thirty seconds later she yells back again, and so it goes.

Most pictures we have of Mavis also contain a glass.  Even when she's with the kids.

Most conversations with Mavis are circuitous and frustrating and relate back to the better days.

She is old school.  When she got married she quit the job she'd had for over a decade since high school graduation and started a family.  While I am pretty sure she took a lot of valium like many other housewives in the seventies, she was dedicated to her family in a way that most women today just aren't. If her kid was on the soccer team, she organized the t shirt drive to pay for parts of the season.  If her husband invited guests at three for dinner, she handled the entire thing: food, candles, bar, dips in the pool late night after a second round of steaks.  She would complain, but she did it.  Instead of giving the silent treatment because she was asked, she did it and was proud she could do it and felt bad for women who did marry was well and weren't ever asked to do it.  She put her own needs on hold so often I don't know if she remembers she had other desires until those of her family overtook hers.  She used to ski.  She used to tend goal in an ice hockey league.  She can clean and debone fish and she water skiied while  very pregnant until her in laws yelled at her.

Mavis is spunky and grew up poor.

Mavis is frightening because her entire life became subsumed by the domestic.

I would drink too.

Which is probably why I guiltily hope for option three for this Sunday:  the kids on a beach bundled against the cold, driven there in a car where I get to sit in the front seat.  We share a bottle of wine after the kids go to sleep but we are not submerged.  We don't get lost in the cups.

I am surely going to hell.