“Mom, please tell me you chose cable.”

Things are tight in the Fuck Yeah household, but not any tighter than usual.

Due to the fact that I’m crap with money, the cable/internet is off for a week or so, which has lead to two sullen teens. “I’m bored” and, consequently, “I’m hungry” are heard echoing through our apartment, making this place sound like the orphanage in a modern day version of Annie. The kids discuss all the wonderful shows they’ll watch (Which have magically transformed into the best things ever, due to their unattainable nature. “Remember Hannah Montana? The ‘Cheese Jerky’ song is a work of genius!”) and computer games they’ll play, when our bill is paid.

But the pouting doesn’t last long. We all know we’re on this ship together and, if we don’t work as a team, we are headed straight for that iceberg.

We go to the grocery store and the girl, who is pragmatic above all else, says “Okay, how much do we have and how many days do we need to shop for?” She then pulls out two carts, pushes one at the boy, and instructs him as to where he should start. We roam the aisles, looking for bargains, careful about “specials” that really aren’t and recipes that require too many ingredients. We always use our store discount card at the end, so we can see how much we’ve saved.

When we come home, he pulls out his guitar, and she the ukulele full of barf (She’s cleaned the strings and says “Who the heck is going to look inside my ukulele or smell it, anyway?”) and they say “Let’s play” and we pick out a few tunes very slowly (He’s a true virtuoso, as are she and I. But only in our own minds.) and discuss names for this new supergroup which has coalesced seemingly by the hand of god and also the hand of poverty. She says “Let’s make our own show! Turn on your webcam!” and we film the opening sequence to the smash hit new series “The Dog and Cat and Girl and Lady Show”, complete with theme song, written and played by us. We laugh until we are exhausted.

I wish it weren’t necessary, but the truth is, we’re good at being poor. When the going gets tough, we get going. We could, all three of us, teach classes in how to make a penny seem like a dollar and how to make a dollar seem like fifty. Even when it’s a hard knock life, we still believe that the sun will come out tomorrow. Especially if tomorrow is when “The Dog and Cat and Girl and Lady Show” premiers. That thing is a phenomenon waiting to happen.

What normal people call a weekend, retail workers call a vacation. And we sometimes have to stand on our heads, or knees, to get one. I may or may not have resorted to hinting to my boss that I was feeling a little overwhelmed at work and, when overwhelmed, I have a tendency to pee in coffee pots. She likes coffee, so she graciously agreed.

I wasn’t sure what to do with my two whole days, but I knew I wanted to take my adorable little family on the road. We decided on Baltimore, Maryland because a) it is only a 2 1/2 hour drive from our home in Richmond, Virginia; b) I had heard good things about the National Aquarium; and c) Baltimore in Summer is pretty much synonymous with beauty. Like Spring in Paris. But with more humidity, yelling, and spraying fire hydrants. Naturally, the whole thing turned into a traveling 3 ring shitshow, proving that I ought never leave the house except to replenish dwindling frozen pizza and Mountain Dew supplies.

Now, there’s something that you should know about me: I have no navigation skills, whatsoever. In a game of Pin The Tail On The Donkey, once I’m blindfolded and spun around, I couldn’t tell you what country I am in, let alone what direction I’m facing. I get turned around every time I venture outside of my neighborhood. If the Ingalls family had been cursed with me as a guide, they’d have never found the Little House. Hell, they’d have never found the Prairie! Sure, like most of my quirks, it can be charming for a short period of time, in a “silly girl can’t find her way out of a closet” kind of way. However, the charm quickly fades when you have to stand on a corner for an hour, waiting for me to show up while I desperately call you and play, “I’m coming. I swear. I just have no idea where I am.” Bonus points if I burst into tears. Double bonus if I miss the actual event we are meeting for. Anyway, the kids know this and have learned to dread every car ride. Bigger car ride = bigger dread and bigger likelihood I will accidentally take us somewhere we don’t want to go. It didn’t take me long to justify their misgivings.

Things really hit the skids (PUNS!) in Washington, DC. I’m not sure why the trusty mapping website I chose took us right through the middle of the city, but it did. The problem was, it got us in but couldn’t get us out. Seriously, we circled the Washington Monument many, many times. At first I was excited about the majesty and beauty of the mighty obelisk, then frustrated, confused, and angry. A girl hasn’t felt this nauseous near a giant white phallus since Monica Lewinsky got a little on her dress.

The natives grew restless.

Her: There’s no way we’re ever going to make it. They will find us ten years from now and we’ll be just bones.

Him: Yeah, but bones that are still driving around DC, trying to find their exit.

Cute. Driving Skeletons. At least they were amusing themselves.

Her: Gah! This trip is like Survivor. VOTE ME OFF THE ISLAND, PLEASE!

Timely. I wasn’t aware that she even had the money to hire 1990′s sitcom writers to express her displeasure.

Him: Hey, Mom, maybe the exit is like Platform 9 3/4. You just have to believe it’s there, and go at it at full speed.

Her: YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Let’s just try it. The worst that could happen is we would die.

Him: Really? The worst?

Her: Right.

Big high fives followed that last one. None of them from me.

Him: I wish I had a volleyball for a best friend right now. WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILSOOOOOOOOOON! WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILSOOOOOOOOOON! I’m sorry, Wilson, I’m sorry!

Wilson Volleyball could not be reached for comment.

I got us there. It took five hours, during which the girl spent a good amount of the time trying to find something sharp enough to end her misery and the boy begged me to never again have one of my “good ideas”.

Wilson? Well, Wilson just stood there.

Me: “What’s Purple Drank?”

Her: “Oh, it’s a drink made of cough syrup with codeine, 7Up, and Jolly Ranchers. He carries it around in a big cup.”

Me: “Ouch, no wonder he has a grill. Wait, how do you know this?”

Her: “Uh, maybe because I’ve been alive for more than five minutes.”

Him: “And because she watches more than kids’ shows on tv.”

Her: “Yeah, did you know there are tv channels without ‘Cartoon’ in their name?”

Him: “And ones that don’t end in ‘-odeon’?”

Her: “Wait, sometimes she watches the news.”

Him: “And cries.”

Her: “Right.”

Him: “Right.”

Me: “You guys are jerks. Also, I wish I had some of that Purple Drank.”

With a predicted high of 104 degrees, I frantically ran through, in my head, reasons that we couldn’t leave the house. Chicken pox? No bumps. Worried about Lindsay Lohan’s future? They’d never buy it since they just heard me say “Girl, you are about to have SEVERAL freaky fridays! IN JAIL!!” the night before. How about global warming? Surely there’s enough proof now, right? My daughter arched an eyebrow when I tried frantically to convince her that Al Gore was right and we should all stay inside, lest we end up like a 3 Piece Meal, extra crispy.

“You don’t even LIKE coleslaw!”

“Mom, go get in the shower.”

Resigned to my fate (and also a teensy bit curious about art shit but mostly resigned), I cleaned up and grabbed the Gold Bond Medicated Powder. If you’re not a chub or are a chub and don’t know, Gold Bond is basically like grownup baby powder that you can sprinkle in your cracks when it’s hot, to keep them dry and fresh-smelling. The medicated version has menthol in it and, when air hit the crack, it’s like a frozen angel is blowing you a kiss. Under your gut. Or between your thigh and your giant cooch mound. Which is totally where frozen angels would kiss, anyway. Of course, if those areas got much air in the first place, you wouldn’t need the powder. Fresh and dry and a front-runner in the Miss Scowly 2010 pageant, I mumbled to the babies to get their asses in the car and we were on our way.

The heat was unfuckingbelievable. You could see waves coming up off the asphalt and birds were dropping out of the sky in complete surrender, praying to their birdie god for the sweet release of death. A quick caffeine stop perked me up (Is speed still illegal? Then, yeah, totally caffeine.) enough that I let the girl choose the radio station for our twenty minute drive. Usher pow pow pow’d and wow oh wow’d as I sipped my liquid personality with an extra shot and gave myself a little pep talk. I knew that in this city, on a weekday, at an art museum, we were bound to be swimming in a sea of old white people when we got there and I practiced my “How interesting!”, “Pop art is for plebs”, and “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?” faces in the rear view mirror. Locked and loaded, we dashed from the relative cool of the car into the relative cool of the museum and grabbed a map.

Now, for the two of you left who don’t know, I have a bit of a poop problem. As in, I do it. All the time. I know every bathroom in this county and the next one over and the quickest way to get from the front door to the ladies at every establishment I frequent. Going someplace new frightens me. What if I can’t find the restroom? What if they don’t HAVE a restroom? I really need someone to do a national potty review blog with a complimentary blackberry/iPhone app so I can have adventures without worrying I’m going to have to poop while crouched behind a bush. Anyway, the run from the car plus that extra shot I had a whole ten minutes ago made it so that I spent the first twenty minutes of our museum trip appreciating the powerful plumbing and flawless acoustics of their shitter. Nothing like a crap symphony to make fancy old ladies clutch their pearls.

After the poopocalypse, we finally got to some art seein’! We wandered through gallery after gallery of paintings, sculptures, photographs, arts and crafts, and furniture. The teens nudged each other and giggled at statue boobies and played “Where’s Waldo: The Penis Version” with nude paintings and cherub statues. I never realized how hilariously dirty a lot of art is, but leave it to a 15 and 17 year old to point it out. But they also appreciated the pieces more than I expected them to, mentioning things that I hadn’t even noticed and I’ve traveled around the world and been to a countless number of art museums. Then again, it could have been the severe caffeine jitters. Hard to seriously deconstruct a painting when you are flying high with espresso brain. Except Picasso cuz his shit always looks like that.

Which reminds me, we saw some Picasso sketches and one was designed sort of like a comic with six panels. The kids had been playing “That’s me, because I’m so pretty” and “That’s me, because I’m so awesome”, finding themselves in paintings, and my son said, pointing to the Picasso comic, “Mom, that’s you,” referring to some hideously deformed man (Picasso Comics presents: The Monstery Looking Guy Who May Or May Not Have Been Based On A King Who Was A Tyrant). So, anyway, I’m all “Haha, you’re right. That’s totally me” when cut to panel five and I suddenly have a GIANT PENIS. “Is that still me? Me with a giant penis?” The kid shrugs and says, “Yeah, I stand by it.”

It’s comforting to know that I am raising goddamn geniuses who love art but can also crack a joke and put their mother in her place. It’s times like these that I hear Maria Von Trapp in my head, singing “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could. So, somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.”

“About what?”

“Just about things I did or said that day. Ways I wasn’t nice. Especially to you. I love you but sometimes I say jerky things. I don’t know why, I just feel mean.”

“When you love someone more than anything, and they love you back, part of what that means is you can hurt them more than anyone, too. When you hurt me, I only feel bad for a short time and then I remember it hurts so badly because we love each other so much. Want to know something else?”

“What?”

“Sometimes I lie awake at night and feel guilty about the same thing.”

*The title is a quote from one of Sylvia Plath’s journals. She also wrote “O love, how did you get here? O embryo” and I am completely convinced that she’d have been the only mom in the playgroup that really got me.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, one thing you absolutely must know about me is I love to sing. It’s the greatest joy I’ve ever found and I suck at it. Really. I can’t carry a tune. I am completely tone deaf. I tied for last place in the only karaoke contest I’ve ever entered and my fellow loser was so drunk that she couldn’t read the words and then ran off the stage to vomit. I’m not kidding. I feel like it’s the most perfect punishment ever to create someone who only feels truly alive while singing and then make them sound like a cat in heat while achieving that bliss. Fuckin’ universe.

The other thing you need to know about me is that I’m the Weird Al of Pottytown. I can’t sing a song, no matter how somber, no matter how serious, without substituting bathroom words. It just ain’t in me. Take, for instance, Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 Poo”. Or Huey Lewis’ “The Fart of Rock and Roll”. Or perhaps Jefferson Starship’s “We Built This City (On a Toilet Bowl) is more your speed. Regardless, if I can slip “poop”, “pee”, “fart” (sometimes “shart”, just to mix it up), “diarrhea”, or “butt” into a song (and I usually can), then I will.

So, back to the living room, from where I have just excused myself to use the restroom, and Kris Allen is singing about making the most of every day, just in case you kick the bucket. Upper, right? I fixed that.

I finished my business, washed up, and decided to give myself a laugh. I ran down the hallway and slid back into the living room, a la Tom Cruise in Risky Business, singing at the top of my lungs “GOTTA FAAAART LIKE WE’RE POOOOPING!” and, as I was singing and sliding, caught sight of my son’s face, which was wearing an expression of pure horror. He turned his head toward me, and I saw that he had his cell phone to his ear.

“Uh-huh. Okay. I’ll be in one day this week. Thank you. Bye,” he said in his “For Grownups Only” voice.

I instantly burst out laughing. Tears came so suddenly that they sprayed the inside of my glasses.

“Oh. My. God.,” I choked, a snort escaping. “Who was that?”

“My principal, saying the honor roll awards came in and I could pick up mine any time over the summer,” he growled.

He gritted his teeth while he spoke, which only made me laugh harder. Can’t put them biscuits back in the can (a homey-sounding expression that I just made up), so you might as well laugh, right?

“I’m so sorry,” I said, now nearing hysteria. My breathing was ragged, my face was red, and I was doing a screamlaugh that caused our upstairs neighbor to stomp around, angrily.

“No you aren’t,” he said.

I wish I could have argued, but the kid knows me.

That’s what I get for not taking notes.

The other day, we were doing our traditional Sunday stroll through Target and had veered off of our usual course so that I could buy a case of bottled water (is this me saying “fuck you, mother earth!”? no. but yes. shit. I like bottled water, okay?). I saw the water display on the back wall and took a right down the soda/alcohol aisle to get there. My super smart, teetotaler children were right on it.

Him: Why are you coming down here? Do you feel like you need a drink?

Me: What? No. I’m just going back here to get water.

Her: Then why did you slow down?

Him: Mom, do you know who liked to drink alcohol? President Kennedy. In 1962. Just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. And look how that turned out.

Me: Um, badly?

Him: It was a disaster. And do you know who else liked to get drunk? Ronald Reagan. Are you aware of the negative impact of Reaganomics? Because you can thank Ronnie for making a national deficit acceptable.

Me: I wasn’t looking. Or stopping. I really just want bottled water.

Her: You know who else was a drunk? Janice Dickinson. The scariest supermodel, ever. Have you seen her? She’s full of rage and barely human! AND she slept with Jack Nicholson! TALK ABOUT BAD LIFE CHOICES!

Me: Look, I don’t even WANT… Wait, how do you know that?

Her: It’s common knowledge.

Me: You guys. Seriously. Can we get the water?

Him: Yes. Do you get the message?

Me: That you guys are jerks?

Her: Yes.

For the record, I’ve never been a big drinker, and I haven’t had any alcohol in 8 months. Social anxiety keeps me home a lot and I’ve never been one to drink alone. Also, I know that some of their craziness is real, and centers around the fact that they are finding out their family tree is heavy with addiction. Also, quite probably, their fears about my brother being in rehab.

It’s okay. I love them. And forgive them. And am glad they have such strong views about the hooch. But if they ever try to come between me and a pile of nachos, I swear to god I will shank ‘em.

Is that a tiny crack called “opportunity” I see? SEX TALK!

We went over the basics, which we do every six months or so, anyway.

“It takes two to get pregnant. Asexual reproduction is rare in humans. Even more rare if you are not a biblical character.”

“The pill is good, but doesn’t protect either partner from STD’s. Unless you count pregnancy as an STD. Which I totally do.”

“The only safe sex is solo sex but condoms are a more realistic option and will keep the makeup off of your private parts. Wait, we’re talking about mime sex, right?”

You know, the usual stuff. Punctuated by the usual eye rolls.

As soon as I said the word “masturbation”, my daughter sighed and pulled out her disapproving whisper.

“Should we be talking about this here? I mean, there are children around. Two of which you gave birth to. One of which doesn’t WANT to eat her quesadilla in the bathroom, but WILL if she has to.”

Remember this awful song? Yeah, me too. The poppy hook. The insipid lyrics. The lead singer who, apparently, was shirt (but not frosted tip) phobic. Oh, 1990′s pop, you never let me down!

I doubleremember this shiny gem because it was the boy’s favorite song for what seemed like 100 years. He used to listen to it on repeat until I thought I would go insane. Until I WISHED for insanity, because being hauled away by the men in white coats would be preferable to the bullshit opening notes that signaled I was about to be tortured for the next four minutes. The song was beyond bad. It was audio ipecac, guaranteed to induce vomiting and, sometimes, even a little bit of diarrhea. But he was obsessed with it, the way four-year-olds get obsessed with things (For the girl, it was Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever”. But that song, and the “small and humble” breasts mentioned in the lyrics, are a story for another time), and I couldn’t tell him about the vomiting, the diarrhea, the frosted tips. Nope, I just had to shut my whore mouth and take one (right in the ear) for the team.

One day we were riding in the car, listening to the song, when the boy piped up.

“Mom, what’s a ‘ress a sew’?”

“I give up. What is it?”

“Nooooooo! I asking yooooouuuuu!”

“Honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Tell me again. What’s it called?”

“‘ress a sew’. The song says ‘Twenty-five years old, my mother got ress a sew’.”

“Oh, no, bubs. It says ‘rest her soul’. ‘Twenty-five years old, my mother god rest her soul’.”

“Oh. What does that mean?”

“It means she died. When someone passes away, you say ‘god rest her soul’. Like going to heaven. Their soul is resting.”

There was a wail from the back seat, followed by a sob.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“I DON’T WANT YOU TO GOT RESS A SEW!”