Woman In Combat

It all started with adhesive tape. I wanted a roll like I used to get. You know. The kind that you used to tape up your swollen ankle when you messed it up playing volleyball. I headed to my friendly drugstore looking for the adhesive tape. Found not one but five different varieties and not the traditional or “classic” that I was looking for. But wait! There it was on the shelf hidden. The other competitor tapes were hanging up for all to see. Being the good consumer that I am, I looked at all the choices. Paper tape that was strong, try it. Mesh tape that was even stronger. Paper and adhesive tape that you didn’t have to cut. Gosh ! How to decide? I decided to buy two of them. The mesh tape and the traditional. How is a busy, cash-strapped housewife or even a working woman supposed to cope?

The adhesive tape was just the tip of the iceberg — the microcosm in the macrocosm so to speak. Have you tried to find a breakfast bar or cereal recently? Unless you have a physician or nutritionist with you to cut through all the ingredient-hype, you might be buying a heart attack instead of a health bar. And I could go on and on. I remember when a poor Albanian woman was visiting me. She was puzzled that all the orange juice wasn’t in the same place. How was she supposed to find the best orange juice?

Is all this choice, all this marketing hype, jockeying for the best position on the shelves helping the world? I ask you, my fellow Americans, what good is choice when it is doing nothing but confusing you!

About five years ago, it’s my recollection, that I ordered a Turkey Sandwich. I loved Turkey Sandwiches. They were my favorites. The nice, thick, juicy white meat, with a slice of tomato and a piece of lettuce usually hit the spot. Better than salami (too smelly, repercussions with people), roast beef (sticks in your teeth and comes out of the bread at unexpected times), grilled cheese (too much cholesterol besides being boring), or even tuna (not currently politically correct).

But — that day the turkey didn’t taste like turkey. It was not thick. It was not juicy. It was not turkey. I was daunted. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t completely dote on food, but this event GOT MY ATTENTION.

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I’m probably on a diet more often than I’m off of one.  I like being on a diet.  It makes me feel uplifted — like I’ll be a new person eventually if not sooner.

I like my diet, that is, until someone brings in a gooey chocolate cake with mmm good chocolate frosting (chocolate is my favorite color).  Then I am upset not so much at the bearer of the cake (though clearly this person doesn’t give a flying rip about my self image), as at the world for creating calories and telling me that chocolate cake with chocolate icing has more calories than almost anything in the world.

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Don’t get me wrong.  I love my mother.  Really, I do!  She is a great lady who did a terrific job raising me if I do say so myself.

Now that I have two children, however, she has made a sort of Jekyll and Hyde transformation from a mother to a GRANDMOTHER (aka “Nana”).  This is a different creature entirely from the mother I knew and loved.  My mother would never have let me or my siblings stay up all hours of the night watching movies and eating sweets.  My mother was never a pushover or overly lenient when it came to pleading or whining.  My mother would never, EVER, tell another woman how to raise her children! And yet, this new creature called Nana is happily changing all that. 

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Or THE PARENTS. (It doesn’t make a difference which.)

It’s only an overnight flying visit as they are on their way to Florida for the winter.

There are people out there who claim to get along — famously, they say — with their in-laws and/or their parents. Some of them even claim to know me. I don’t believe them. Somewhere in their mind they have gone into what I call “parental withdrawal.” They are just denying what the rest of the us sane people out there acknowledge. Either that or they are locked in an AT&T ad.

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